Someone pulled roughly 4,000 BTC, about $320 million, out of Liquid Network's federation wallet on September 6. The wallet held about 4,200 BTC before the transaction. It held about 200 after.

Bitcoin itself was never touched. The exploit hit a validation bug in Liquid's Elements software, the federated sidechain Blockstream runs on top of Bitcoin, not Bitcoin's base layer. The attacker used a legitimate peg-out route with real federation signatures to redeem L-BTC tokens that should never have existed.

Then came the negotiation, conducted entirely in on-chain messages. The attacker asked Blockstream to patch the bug first, promised to send funds back after. By September 8, about 3,400 BTC had come back. Roughly 598 BTC, around $47 million, stayed with the attacker as a self-declared bounty.

Metaplanet's executive stock option pool had grown nearly sevenfold since 2022, from about 46 million potential shares to 319 million, thanks to a clause that expanded it automatically every time the company raised capital to buy Bitcoin. The board capped it there on August 18.

Ten days later, CEO Simon Gerovich exercised 92,000 of his own rights, converting them into 64 million shares. Shareholders were furious about the timing, and separately pushed for answers about Gerovich's disclosed but incompletely explained stake in MMXX Ventures, one of the company's own shareholders. The stock dropped as much as 17% after Gerovich's first public response on September 6 failed to satisfy anyone.

On September 11, the board fully reversed course. The pool got cut 41%, back down to 188 million shares, using an older reference date from before last year's international offering. A plan to hand more rights to an employee incentive vehicle got scrapped entirely.

The Financial Times reported this week that Iran's central bank has quietly relaxed its foreign exchange controls, telling exporters to repatriate earnings by whatever means work, Bitcoin and Tether's USDT included. Officials have reportedly stopped focusing on where the funds came from before they hit Iranian accounts.

This isn't new activity so much as newly acknowledged activity. Blockchain analytics firms estimate Iran's crypto flows hit somewhere between $7.8 and $10 billion in 2025, depending on the methodology. Wallets linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps alone received over $3 billion.

Washington is responding directly. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent launched Operation Economic Outcast on August 24, aimed specifically at severing Iran's crypto channels, and Tether has already frozen more than $130 million tied to sanctioned Iranian wallets.

Bitcoin's 90-day rolling correlation with gold just hit its highest level in almost six years, according to Bitwise. The last time it was this high was 2020, during the Covid stimulus era.

The trigger was the bond market. When Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent expanded long-dated bond buybacks in August as yields climbed, Bitcoin and gold moved together while stocks fell. Bitcoin posted its best week since March 2024, up 22.4%. Gold added about 5%. Bitcoin's correlation to the S&P 500, meanwhile, dropped toward zero.

Grayscale's numbers tell the same story from a different angle: Bitcoin's correlation to gold has gone from near zero at the start of the year to over 50%, while its correlation to the Nasdaq has fallen from 60% to 33%.

Bitcoin just decoupled from the stock market in a way we’ve only seen once before — and the last time, Bitcoin went on a historic 9,800% run. With global debt rising, currencies under pressure, Wall Street buying, and the debasement trade accelerating, the setup for Bitcoin may be changing fast. Is this the beginning of Bitcoin’s first true parabolic run since 2021, and possibly the biggest since 2013?