Bitcoin sat near $64K on Aug. 4 despite $211.5M in spot ETF inflows and S&P 500 records, as Glassnode, Bitfinex, and Wintermute flag historically low volatility and seller exhaustion.
Bitcoin News
The options market has essentially stopped betting on Bitcoin moving in either direction.
Implied volatility on the upside has fallen to the lowest reading Glassnode has ever recorded for that metric, near 23%. For a market that spent much of 2024 and 2025 swinging violently, the silence is unusual enough to draw attention on its own.
Bitcoin (BTC) traded near $64,000 on Aug. 4, a day when US stocks pushed to fresh records. The S&P 500 closed at 7,737. The Nasdaq gained 2.6%, lifted by strong AI earnings. Brent crude slid below $80 as tensions eased in the Strait of Hormuz. Bitcoin sat out all of it, finishing more than four percentage points behind the S&P 500 for the session, according to Glassnode.
$211M in ETF Inflows Did Nothing to Lift the Price
US spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) absorbed $211.5 million in net inflows on Aug. 4. Spot Ethereum (ETH) ETFs added $53.8 million on the same day. Neither figure moved the market. Wintermute OTC trader Jasper De Maere said the marginal buyer in spot is not positioned outright long, and argued that the recovery thesis only becomes credible if BTC clears $65,000 convincingly in the near term. Wintermute priced Bitcoin's one-day straddle at a 1.01% implied move into Wednesday's options expiry, mapping out an expected range of roughly $63,454 to $64,749, the tightest print of the week.
The Coldcard hardware wallet exploit added another layer of complexity to the week's onchain picture. A theft of 594 BTC from Coldcard wallets on July 31, worth about $38 million, prompted holders to move roughly 119,000 BTC out of long-term dormancy over three days, 200 times the amount stolen. Glassnode said only about a tenth of that supply reached exchanges. The rest moved into fresh cold storage, and the event left no measurable sell pressure in spot markets. Separately, K33 reported that Bitcoin's seven-day active supply hit a 2026 high of about 890,000 BTC as the exploit widened, a level that head of research Vetle Lunde said has historically clustered near local market tops and bottoms.
Bitfinex Sees Breakeven Holders as a Historic Bottom Signal
Onchain cost-basis data from Bitfinex shows that roughly 155,000 BTC has accumulated between $62,000 and $65,000, making it Bitcoin's largest concentration of holder cost basis and representing about 0.7% of circulating supply. With 54.6% of supply in profit as of the Aug. 2 close, Bitfinex said the average holder is sitting near breakeven. The firm said that condition has historically appeared at cycle bottoms rather than ahead of further breakdowns.
Glassnode's Seller Exhaustion Constant sits at its lowest point of this cycle, within the zone where every previous bear market bottom formed. The firm noted the reading is still roughly a third above the absolute floor that prior bear markets reached before reversing. It also found that when one-month realized volatility has compressed to comparable levels in the past, the subsequent price move has almost always resolved to the upside. The caveat the firm attached is significant: every prior compression of this kind formed with an active institutional demand engine running. This one is forming while that engine is still in reverse, with US spot ETFs and corporate treasuries returning roughly 65,800 BTC in June alone, their worst month on record.
The next catalyst may come from outside the crypto market entirely. Capital.com senior financial market analyst Kyle Rodda said the probability of a September Federal Reserve rate hike has dropped to about 60%, down from as high as 100% before last week's Federal Open Market Committee meeting, following softer job-openings data. Economists expect the US economy added 85,000 jobs in July, with unemployment holding at 4.2%. Bitfinex said rising real yields and the defense of the $62,000 to $65,000 range are now the most likely factors to determine Bitcoin's next directional move.
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