Bitcoin closed Monday, August 24, at US$78,964, up 1.56%, after stalling below US$80,000 during the session. The move came as the debasement trade returned, with a weaker US dollar and expanded Treasury bond buybacks pushing investors into Bitcoin and gold as hedges against fiscal erosion.
Who Gets Pulled Into the Game
The people at the bottom of this market don’t get to set the terms. They get the whiplash. Liquidations across the market totaled about US$439 million in 24 hours and were split near-evenly between longs and shorts, far below the US$2.99 billion wiped out on August 19. That’s the cost of a system where leveraged bets and institutional mood swings can vaporize money in a day, while the biggest players keep moving.
Ethereum rose 0.73% to US$2,482, Solana climbed 3.27% to US$98.56, and XRP fell 2.83% to US$1.479 after broader altcoin weakness following a recent flash crash. The numbers move fast. The losses do too.
Who’s Buying, Who’s Left Holding the Bag
Strive bought another US$81.5 million of Bitcoin, while Bitmine bought US$81 million more of Ethereum. Strive held 21,356 BTC after Monday’s purchase at an average of US$73,409 per coin, and its Nasdaq-traded shares closed 8.3% higher at US$19.73. Bitmine was described as about 187,000 Ethereum short of a 5% supply target. The market keeps rewarding the firms with enough capital to hoard more of the scarce stuff, while everyone else watches the price get dragged around by the same concentrated power.
The article said Bitcoin’s rally was a US fiscal story, not some mystical breakthrough. A weaker US dollar and expanded Treasury bond buybacks pushed investors toward Bitcoin and gold as hedges against fiscal erosion. That’s the language of the apparatus: when the state and finance wobble, ordinary people are told to seek shelter in assets that still belong to the market.
Latin America Runs on Dollar Tokens
Latin America’s crypto economy continues to run on stablecoins for everyday payments and remittances. In Brazil, stablecoins accounted for 98% of crypto purchases in the first quarter of 2026, on US$6.9 billion of quarterly volume. In Argentina, more than 70% of purchases on Bitso in 2025 were USDT and USDC. The piece also said more than 90% of regional digital-asset throughput in 2025 ran through dollar-linked tokens.
That’s not some freewheeling digital commons. It’s a region pushed toward dollar-linked tokens because people need something usable for payments and remittances. The infrastructure of finance keeps setting the terms, and people adapt because they have to.
El Salvador’s digital-currency remittances reached US$35.4 million in the first half of 2026, up 39.1% year on year, but still only 0.7% of total remittance flows. The number is bigger. The dependence is bigger. The share is still tiny.
The Next Layer of Control
Gemini is planning to distribute crypto prediction markets through Apex, and Coinbase is bringing tokenized stocks to an Ethereum layer-2 network via custodian Alpaca. New products, new intermediaries, same old hierarchy. The names change. The gatekeepers don’t.
The immediate question is whether Bitcoin can hold above US$80,000 on a closing basis, a level it has failed to sustain since May. That’s the market’s little cliff edge, where traders, firms, and speculators wait for the next shove from above.