Crypto markets turned cautiously higher early this week, with Bitcoin rebounding to around $83,600 ahead of fresh inflation data and a wave of institutional buying making headlines. Among altcoins, Stacks (STX) stood out after rising more than 6% in 24 hours and extending its seven-day gain above 10%, driven by growing interest in the network’s Bitcoin staking program.
Strive overtakes Strategy as the most aggressive Bitcoin buyer. Between October 5 and October 9, Vivek Ramaswamy’s Strive Asset Management purchased 3,311 BTC for roughly $280 million at an average price near $84,500. That was Strive’s largest single Bitcoin buy since January and brought its total holdings to 32,773 BTC, worth about $2.73 billion. By comparison, Michael Saylor’s Strategy bought just 250 BTC for about $21.5 million in the same period, making Strive the top weekly buyer by a factor of roughly 13 to 1. Strategy still holds 848,250 BTC, but its mNAV has slipped below 1.0, and it spent nearly $192 million buying back preferred shares. Strive also announced a $500 million preferred stock sale with a 15% annual dividend, with proceeds earmarked for more Bitcoin.
Stacks rallies ahead of Bitcoin staking bonding period. STX traded near $0.4119 after rising 6.74% over 24 hours, with daily volume of about $108.7 million and a market cap near $772 million. The token has gained 10.28% over seven days, 29% over 14 days and 51.5% over 30 days. The rally follows the launch of Stacks’ institutional Bitcoin staking program, which lets participants keep BTC on the main Bitcoin network while locking STX worth about 5% of their BTC position to access staking capacity. The program’s Genesis Bond attracted approximately 230 BTC and 3.57 million STX from 21Shares, HashKey Cloud, UTXO Management and Sypher Capital. The next Bonding Period 3 is expected around November 10, and analyst Elite Crypto has pointed to $0.476 as resistance and $0.70 as a possible breakout target.
Other market catalysts added to the risk-on tone. U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded $175 million in net inflows on Tuesday, while spot Ether ETFs flipped back to $25 million of inflows after a 10-day outflow streak. Interactive Brokers enabled ETH staking for clients through Zero Hash. On Solana, core developer Anza scheduled the Alpenglow consensus upgrade for mainnet-beta on October 21, aiming to cut finality from about 12.8 seconds to 150 milliseconds. Elsewhere, Binance confirmed it will shut down Binance Pool on November 10, ending its mining services after nine years and disconnecting miners representing roughly 2.3% of network hashrate. BNY and Citadel Securities completed a test transaction using tokenized U.S. Treasuries to move bonds from settlement into financing, while Trezor announced it will end all reseller authorizations on January 1, 2027 following a Ledger security team discovery.
