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Morning Edition · Monday, August 24, 2026Published at 1:55 AM EDT · New York
Bitcoin Holds Above $77,000 After Its Largest Weekly Gain in Two Years
XRP rose 46 percent over the same week as traders positioned for Kevin Warsh's first Jackson Hole address on Friday, while Russia's central bank told households to stay out of mining.
Bitcoin held above $77,000 on Monday after a weekly advance that CoinDesk put at 21 percent, with XRP up 46 percent over the same stretch. CNBC reported a 22 percent weekly gain and a Friday close near $76,944, and The Block described it as bitcoin's biggest weekly move in two years.
The rally began with a policy signal rather than anything native to digital assets. Traders who had positioned for bitcoin to stay below $67,000 were forced to close those positions after the Treasury doubled its long-bond repurchases, and the resulting short covering amplified the move. Gold traded near $4,607 an ounce on 21 August according to Trading Economics data, still below the level it reached in January.
Attention now turns to Wyoming. Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh delivers his first Jackson Hole keynote on Friday, under the symposium theme of financial innovation and payments, nineteen days before the 16 September rate decision. Markets are pricing roughly one-in-three odds of a September increase.
Official caution runs in the other direction elsewhere. The Bank of Russia urged citizens on Monday to avoid mining cryptocurrency at home, citing electrical load and legal exposure, a reminder that state attitudes toward digital assets diverge sharply even as prices converge globally.
Part of a tracked trend
Bitcoin Trades as a Risk Asset, Not Digital Gold
At each geopolitical or inflationary stress point, bitcoin keeps trading with liquidity-sensitive risk assets rather than with monetary metals, so the digital-gold framing continues to fail exactly when investors most want it to hold.
What this means
This week's move came from a Treasury balance-sheet decision, not from adoption or scarcity, which is evidence that bitcoin still trades on dollar liquidity expectations. Holders gain when Washington signals it will absorb duration and lose when tightening returns, which places them on the same side of the trade as leveraged equity investors rather than gold holders. Warsh's tone on Friday decides which of those two conditions applies into September.
What to watch
- Whether Warsh's Jackson Hole language leans toward containing inflation or toward supporting market functioning, since the first would test how quickly this rally reverses.
- The gap between bitcoin's weekly move and gold's, which shows whether investors are treating the two as substitutes or as opposite ends of the risk spectrum.
- Spot bitcoin and ether exchange-traded fund flows, which separate leveraged short covering from durable allocation.
Observations to monitor, not financial advice.
Synthesized from: CoinDesk · RIA Novosti
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Comments
1Aug 25, 12:26 AM · edited
Treasury long bond repurchases reduce net duration supply and compress real yields, and BTC's negative beta to real rates means the short cover was the symptom of that macro shift rather than its cause.