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📈 Bitcoin rises: Best week for Bitcoin ETFs since the crash

📈 Bitcoin rises: Best week for Bitcoin ETFs since the crash

PLUS: AI’s memory crunch just made Amazon devices more expensive

Cryptopolitan News
August 24, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

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Best week for Bitcoin ETFs since Bitcoin crash

US spot Bitcoin ETFs attracted $1.92 billion last week, the largest weekly inflow in 10 months. That's not just a good week. The prior week those same funds lost just under $390mn, their biggest weekly loss in six weeks. Bitcoin itself had rallied about 23%, its best weekly rise in more than three years.

One fund did most of the work

As for where the $1.92 billion of inflows came from, more than two-thirds ($1.33 billion) was attributed to BlackRock's IBIT alone during the week. While Fidelity's FBTC added $293 million, ARK's ARKB numbers were in the ballpark of just under $127 million.

This was not just a story of Bitcoin: Ether ETFs also had their own record week, with inflows of $697 million. Overall, Bitcoin and Ether funds attracted US$2.6 billion across both categories in the strongest week since October, with the group seeing overall trading volume more than treble to US$29 billion.

You still haven't recovered the year in this rally

Bitcoin ETFs remain approx $2.9 billion in net outflows so far in 2026, even after the best week in ten months. Ether ETFs are still in the red for 2026 to the tune of approximately $192 million. A single good week only recovered a fraction of what left earlier in the year, not all of it.

This stands, or not, over the next few days

At this moment, Bitcoin is testing the zone between $79,500 and $80,000, a zone that sellers have dominated in the past. In case the breakout is real and not simply a bounce, then daily close above $80,000 would confirm it.

The support area is around $75,000 to $76,000 while below that if the momentum fails, it's simply at $71,500. The larger question analysts continue to ask is whether this was fueled by real new money or mainly short sellers being squeezed out of losing trades; a rally based on a squeeze usually fizzles once those positions are unwound.

The most immediate test comes on Monday as US markets reopen and ETF flows resume following the weekend, with an echo of the inflows seen last week suggesting fresh capital is still coming through. If it is a quieter session, that would suggest the move has already occurred.

Outside of crypto, the backdrop is wobblier

US stock market last week closed under pressure. The Dow dipped 0.8% for its second consecutive weekly losses, the S&P 500 sank by 1.4%, while the Nasdaq tumbled 2%, putting end to three-week winning streaks by both.

At the start of this week, futures were pointing somewhat lower once more. Asian markets also largely traded lower; Japan's Nikkei down 0.74%, South Korea's Kospi down 3.12% and China's CSI 300 down 1.21% with Australia being the only gainer in the Asian pack.

Bonds are an actual part of the pressure with the 30-year US Treasury note yield eclipsing last week's peak above 5.3%, highest in nearly two decades, while long-term borrowing costs in Japan, France and Germany each set new multi-year highs on their own.

Given how much of the crypto rally into a down week for the rest of the market has set up expectations that Jackson Hole next week from Fed Chair Kevin Warsh, and inflation data also next week can maintain that divergence worth watching closely.

POLL: Could this be the trigger for a $100K BTC rally?

1️⃣ Anthropic and OpenAI subscriptions offer thousands in API-equivalent usage, squeezing AI margins

A new SemiAnalysis study suggests that OpenAI and Anthropic's $200-a-month flat-rate AI plans deliver more usage than the price alone would seem to justify, raising a real question for both companies: how long can they keep subsidizing access to the technology while investors expect AI to turn a profit?

SemiAnalysis tested this by buying subscriptions to both and running them through heavy coding workloads until each hit its weekly usage cap.

2️⃣ Meta pulls OpenAI veteran into Superintelligence Labs talent war

Meta has pulled in another well-known AI researcher for its Superintelligence Labs: Luke Metz, an early member of OpenAI's ChatGPT team. It's the latest sign of how fierce the competition for AI talent has become across top labs.

On its own, hiring Metz might not reshape the field, but it fits a larger pattern, top researchers are hopping between rival labs every few months, so each hire effectively doubles as a loss for someone else. Metz will reportedly report to Alexandr Wang, the former Scale AI chief now running Meta's AI efforts.

3️⃣ AI’s memory crunch just made Amazon devices more expensive

Amazon is raising prices across a range of its consumer electronics as surging memory-chip costs squeeze its hardware business. Echo speakers, Fire TV devices, Kindles, and eero routers are all affected, with some prices jumping as much as 60%.

The increases are an early sign of AI's boom reaching regular consumers: cloud providers and data centers are buying up memory chips for AI infrastructure, tightening supply and pushing component costs higher, and Amazon is now passing some of that cost along. The 16GB Kindle is reportedly going up $40 to $149.99, while the basic Echo Dot is expected to jump from $49.99 to $79.99.