Bitcoin posted its largest dollar-denominated weekly gain on record, adding $14,264 to close at $77,387, a gain of roughly 22.7% over seven days. The rally accelerated after the U.S. Treasury expanded its government bond buyback program and spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds recorded their strongest weekly inflows since October 2025.
Strive chairman and CEO Matt Cole said Bitcoin’s breakout against both the U.S. dollar and gold reinforces his view that the next Bitcoin cycle could be the strongest ever. U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs attracted $1.92 billion in total net inflows during the trading week ended Aug. 21, according to SoSoValue data, while the Crypto Fear & Greed Index climbed to 78, its highest since December 2024. Cole expects dollar weakness and rising demand for scarce assets to support Bitcoin over the next 12 to 18 months. He pointed to a “growing hunt for scarcity in an AI-driven world of abundance” and said capital will increasingly place a premium on forms of scarcity that cannot be manufactured away.
The Bitcoin-to-gold ratio rose to 16.73 ounces of gold per Bitcoin, its highest since May. Cole noted that Bitcoin peaked against gold in December 2024, before its dollar peak in October 2025, and bottomed against gold in February 2026, before the dollar bottom in July. Strive continued buying during the downturn, adding 2,500 BTC between May 23 and June 1 for about $185.2 million at an average price near $74,092, followed by another 759 BTC for roughly $50 million. Its holdings reached 19,864 BTC, with no short-term or long-term debt.
Separately, a Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland working paper published on July 14, 2026 found that information about Bitcoin’s previous gains can change how much cryptocurrency U.S. households want to own. In randomized testing, Bitcoin return information raised desired crypto allocations by roughly two percentage points, a 47% increase from the control group’s average desired allocation of 4.3%. Actual crypto purchases subsequently increased about 2.5 percentage points among households shown Bitcoin performance information. Researchers Michael Weber, Bernardo Candia, Olivier Coibion and Yuriy Gorodnichenko examined recurring surveys with between 15,000 and 25,000 responses per wave. Crypto owners expected 22% annual returns in the third quarter of 2021, compared with 7% among nonowners; by 2025 those expectations had fallen to 13.8% for owners and 4.7% for nonowners. The authors wrote that positive returns attract new participants, which raises the price further, presenting the finding as a possible bubble mechanism rather than a forecast that every Bitcoin rally will become self-reinforcing.
The study also found that doubling Bitcoin’s price made a household with its entire financial portfolio in crypto about 1.4 percentage points more likely to buy a durable good, with the strongest response in items such as computers and refrigerators. The authors stressed that the working paper represents their research and does not establish official Federal Reserve policy.
