The Weekly Wrap
The total crypto market climbed 4.78% over the past 7 days, pushing market cap to $2.63T.
Bitcoin ETFs have now recorded four consecutive weeks of inflows, with $153.87M added last week, signalling continued institutional demand.
Ethereum ETFs, on the other hand, saw $82.47M in outflows, snapping a three-week run of positive flows and highlighting a growing divergence between BTC and ETH positioning.
On the regulatory front, the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act took a key step forward, with lawmakers reaching a compromise on stablecoin yield. The proposal bans “earn by holding” rewards but still allows incentives tied to actual usage.
Translation: the model shifts from buy and sit → buy and use.
Bitcoin vs Gold vs Nasdaq YTD.
🟡 Gold: +4.80%\ 🔵 NASDAQ: +9.09%\ 🟠 Bitcoin: -7.73%
For the first time this year, the NASDAQ is now outperforming gold, signalling a shift back toward risk-on sentiment. Bitcoin has tracked closely with equities since early April, recovering sharply from its February lows and narrowing its YTD drawdown from nearly -30% to just -7.73%.
Sentiment is still cautious overall, with the Fear & Greed Index sitting at 33 (Fear), although this is a noticeable improvement from the extreme fear levels seen earlier this month.
Bitcoin vs Gold vs Nasdaq YTD.
🟡 Gold: +8.59%
🔵 NASDAQ: +7.68%
🟠 Bitcoin: -11.36%
Gold remains one of the strongest performers on the year, although momentum has cooled after the sharp rally seen during the peak of geopolitical tensions earlier in the quarter.
The bigger story recently has been the NASDAQ. After falling as much as 8% on the year during the broader market sell-off, US equities have staged a strong recovery and are now nearly back in line with gold’s 2026 performance.
Bitcoin has also recovered from the lows, climbing steadily over recent weeks, but continues to lag behind traditional markets on a year-to-date basis. The move does, however show risk appetite slowly returning after one of the more volatile starts to a year in recent memory.
Source: Tradingview, BTC, GOLD, NASDAQ
Macro: Australia
Microsoft just dropped a $25 billion bet on Australia’s AI future.
The investment will significantly expand local data centres, cloud, and AI supercomputing capacity by 2029, alongside upgrades to cybersecurity and a major push to train millions of Australians in AI skills.
Australia is starting to look lfcyberess like a user of global tech… and more like a hub for the infrastructure behind it.
Housing Market:
The Reserve Bank has delivered a third consecutive interest rate hike, lifting the cash rate to 4.35 per cent.
Australia’s housing crisis is getting harder to ignore, with new data showing affordability has effectively collapsed.
Out of 49,000 rental listings nationwide, just one property was affordable for someone on JobSeeker, and none for Youth Allowance recipients.
Even full-time work isn’t enough anymore… a single minimum-wage worker can afford just 0.5% of rentals, while a dual-income couple on minimum wage can access only 14.8% of listings, down sharply from around one in four a decade ago.
Bitcoin
BTC is up 6.81% on the week!
Public companies just had their biggest quarter ever for Bitcoin accumulation, adding over 50,000 BTC in Q1 as corporate adoption continues to accelerate.
Source: Bitwise
Wall Street is getting more comfortable with Bitcoin… just not going all in.
Morgan Stanley is now guiding clients toward a 2–4% allocation to crypto, framing it as a small but meaningful part of a diversified portfolio.
They’re still calling it speculative, but also comparing Bitcoin to “digital gold” and placing it alongside real assets.
Some institutions appear to be adopting low single-digit allocations as an entry point
Bitcoin saw strong momentum through April, breaking back above $80K and continuing its recent uptrend.
April has historically been a strong month for crypto, and this year followed that trend with a solid recovery from earlier lows.
Now we move into May… a month often associated with the “sell in May and go away” narrative.
From a technical perspective, Bitcoin is now approaching a key level, with the daily 200 EMA sitting just above current price, which often acts as a major resistance zone in trending markets.
The key question: does Bitcoin break through and continue higher, or does this level slow momentum after a strong April run?
Source: Tradingview BTC/USD
Etherium
ETH has also had a great week up 3.94%
A blast from the past 👀
An Ethereum ICO wallet just woke up after nearly 11 years, moving 10,000 ETH originally bought for $3K USD… now worth $23M USD.
Before panic kicks in, analysts aren’t calling this a sell. More likely: wallet reshuffling, key recovery, or prepping funds for staking or management.
Source: CryptoQuant
As per the chart above Ethereum continues to show signs of quiet accumulation.
On-chain data shows sustained inflows into accumulation addresses, with long-term holders continuing to add ETH even as price has moved sideways.
Notably, the current price is sitting close to the realised price of these accumulation wallets, meaning many long-term holders are still building positions around current levels.
This suggests ETH remains in an accumulation phase… even if price hasn’t fully reflected it yet.
Altcoins
Solana also made headlines this week after teaming up with Google Cloud to launch Pay.sh, a stablecoin payment service that lets AI agents pay for API access on a per-request basis. Instead of needing traditional accounts or subscriptions, AI agents can use stablecoins on Solana to access services like Gemini, BigQuery, Vertex AI and dozens of other APIs.
Meanwhile, DeFi security is back in focus after Kelp DAO moved away from LayerZero and adopted Chainlink’s cross-chain infrastructure following last month’s $292M bridge exploit. The shift highlights a bigger theme across DeFi right now: cross-chain infrastructure is becoming more important, but also more heavily scrutinised.
Categories over the past 7 days.
Artificial Intelligence (AI): +3.97%\ Meme: +1.03%\ Decentralized Finance (DeFi): +0.73%\ Real World Assets (RWA): +0.15%\ Gaming (GameFi): -0.04%
AI is clearly leading the charge over the past 7 days, while Gaming has cooled off after leading in last week’s report. Memes have remained relatively steady, with DOGE standing out as one of the stronger performers, up around 16.15% over the same period.
Source: Coingecko categories
Bitcoin dominance has pushed back above 60%, breaking out above the range highs that had been holding since November 2025.
That move highlights where capital is flowing right now… firmly back into BTC.
As a result, the Altcoin Season Index has slipped to 38, keeping the market in Bitcoin season territory.
Source: Tradingview BTC.
Stablecoins & RWA
Tokenised real-world assets (RWAs) have pushed past $30B in on-chain value, with U.S. Treasuries leading the charge by a wide margin. At the same time, total represented value is sitting north of $400B, showing how quickly traditional assets are being mirrored on-chain.
Stablecoins are still the backbone here, hovering around $299B in total value with over 246M holders, acting as the liquidity layer that makes all of this possible.
Tether just reminded everyone how profitable stablecoins can be.
The firm reported $1.04B in profit for Q1 2026, even with choppy market conditions, while building its reserve buffer to a record $8.2B.
It also claims to hold $141B in U.S. Treasuries, putting it among the largest holders globally… although a full audit is still in progress.
THIS WEEKS INSIGHTS
The “boring phase” isn’t as boring as it looks.
In Part 2 of the Boring Phase Playbook, we shift from mindset to structure… covering risk management, macro influence, and how crypto is evolving into a broader digital asset ecosystem.
It’s a reminder that quieter markets are often where the real groundwork gets built.
Read the full article: https://www.cointree.com/news/the-boring-phase-playbook-part-2/
