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The historically volatile bitcoin price has had every reason to tank this week, yet it traded sideways.
The ongoing Coldcard hardware wallet fiasco shook hardcore Bitcoiners’ faith in self-custody. Strategy sold another chunk of BTC. Passage of the CLARITY Act remained a longshot.
But as of Thursday afternoon in New York, the original and still most valuable cryptocurrency was trading $64,452.01, essentially flat on a 24-hour and 7-day basis and up about 1.2% from a month earlier. What gives?
Our take
Though tragic, the Coldcard exploit affected a small amount of bitcoin – about $130 million worth, compared to a $1.2 trillion market cap – and a self-selected minority of hobbyist users. Self-sovereign HODLERs may be living up to the cypherpunk ideal, but they’re outliers. Bitcoin, for better or worse, has institutionalized, and institutional investors prefer exchange-traded products over direct ownership; the ones that do trade actual coins without paper wrappers typically keep them at third-party custodians.
So as shocking and saddening as it was to see hackers drain so many individuals’ life savings, market participants quite understandably treated the incident as a product-specific implementation failure.
Zooming out, crypto just finished its best month in 2026 so far, seemingly decoupling from the turbulence in equities during the same period. Bitcoin rose roughly 7% in July, its second-best monthly gain of the year, and ETH climbed about 18%, its best month this year. Spot bitcoin ETFs, which logged their worst month on record in June, turned to net inflows in July with $194 million. The Crypto Fear & Greed Index held in "fear" territory for much of last month despite the price gains but is turning toward “neutral.”
BTC spent most of July range-bound between the high-$50,000 and mid-$60,000 range. The price repeatedly tested its 200-week moving average from both sides as Iran headlines, chip-sector risk-off spillover, and shifting ETF flows pushed it in and out of range, before closing the month firmer near $64,000.
All that happened even though Strategy was a net seller through most of July following broader pressure from the preferred-stock stress that forced a capital-structure overhaul in late June. Michael Saylor’s company sold 3,588 BTC (~$216 million) in early July – its largest single sale ever – to fund preferred-stock dividends, then raised roughly $466.7 million and $263.5 million in back-to-back weeks by selling MSTR common stock rather than touching its BTC holdings.
So, by Monday morning, when Strategy disclosed a further sale of 1,638 BTC (~$105 million), investors may well have grown used to it.
July was also the month we at Galaxy Research cut our odds of the CLARITY Act passing in 2026 passage odds to 30%, from a coin-flip in June. Yet the crypto market didn’t wobble on the bearish CLARITY developments that led us to change our probability assessment. Bitcoin finished July well above where it traded back when CLARITY's odds stood at 60%.
As we’ve stated before, a CLARITY failure wouldn't leave the industry empty-handed, because regulators can still deliver most of what it wants through agency guidance over the next few years, just without statute permanence.
Supporting that view, institutional building continues. It’s possible the market is pricing CLARITY as one lever among several rather than the sole gate to institutional adoption.
Perhaps it’s too soon to say the bottom is in. But this resilience is remarkable.
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