Strategy Barely Bought Bitcoin This Week. Guess Who Did.

From Yesterday's Simply Bitcoin Live | Episode 1607

The Numbers

Price is stuck near three-week lows even as the three biggest public holders keep adding to their stacks.

The News

Metaplanet sold 10,000 BTC, then bought back 11,000, a net add of 1,000 coins that pushed its stack to 44,000 BTC and bumped it past Twenty One Capital into second place behind Strategy. Strive made its biggest purchase since June, 2,000 BTC for $169 million, lifting its own stack to 29,462 BTC. Strategy, still the largest holder by a wide margin, added just 334 BTC this week, its smallest buy in months.

Combined, Strategy, Metaplanet, and Twenty One Capital now hold more than 935,000 BTC. At the same time, $3.3 billion left Binance in two weeks, the exchange's biggest outflow in three years. Less coin sitting on exchanges, more of it locked in corporate vaults.

The supply keeps shrinking. The buyers keep lining up anyway.

A year after Bitcoin's $126,000 peak on October 6, 2025, price is down just 32%, according to CoinDesk. After the 2013, 2017, and 2021 cycle tops, Bitcoin was down 69.7%, 82.3%, and 74.6% at the same one-year mark.

This cycle's bottom also arrived early, around the nine-month mark instead of the usual twelve to eighteen, and only cost 53% instead of the historical 77 to 85%. The explanation: ETFs, asset managers, and corporate treasuries are driving this cycle now, not the retail leverage that used to blow up and take years to dig out of.

The Culture

The CLARITY Act died in the Senate, so CFTC Chairman Mike Selig used the agency's existing authority instead. He unveiled two new rules, Regulation CTX and Regulation CAM, giving crypto exchanges a federal registration option, including the power to offer margin and leverage under CFTC oversight rather than a patchwork of state money transmission licenses.

Explaining the new powers on CNBC the same morning, Selig told anchors, "you're able to offer fraud, not fraud." He meant margin and leverage.

Congress couldn't pass clarity. The chairman just improvised some.