This was the week the bear market finally blinked. After grinding sideways under $63,000 for what felt like forever, Bitcoin tore through resistance from Wednesday onward. The trigger: the US Treasury announced it would double its long-dated bond buybacks — from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation, starting 9 September — which dragged yields down and sent money hunting for risk. Then President Trump sat down with crypto executives at the White House and leaned on Congress to get the CLARITY Act moving, and the combination lit up the kind of short squeeze that makes charts go vertical: over $1 billion in short positions got liquidated within a single hour as BTC crossed $69,000, then more than $2.5 billion over 24 hours as it kept climbing. By Friday, Bitcoin had posted its biggest weekly gain in two years, crossing $79,000 — up roughly 22% in five trading days. Ethereum went one better in percentage terms, surging 27% on the week to test $2,400. The Fear & Greed Index went from 29 ("Fear") a week ago to 72 ("Greed") by Friday — a 41-point mood swing in seven days, which is the entire crypto market going from "everyone's broke" to "everyone's a genius" in less time than it takes to defrost a party pie.
And here's the bit that makes it alt season, not just a Bitcoin pump: altcoin market cap punched back above $1 trillion for the first time in nearly a month, and the gains weren't confined to the top two. XRP led the charge with a 39% weekly gain, Chainlink and Zcash both put on more than 30%, and Solana pushed toward the $100 mark. Not everyone got the invite, though — WLFI, Uniswap and a couple of others sat this one out in the red while the rest of the market partied, and the Humanity token copped an 80%+ crash after a $32 million private-key theft — a timely reminder that "the market's up" and "your coins are safe" are two completely separate questions.
The coins that put a smile on somebody's dial this week — and there were a lot of smiles going around:
| # | Coin | Price | Move | Poida's take |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | XRP | $1.39 | +39% | Led the entire rally. When XRP's out front of Bitcoin and Ethereum, you know it's a proper alt-season week, not just a BTC pump. |
| 2 | ZEC (Zcash) | $646 | +34% | From $483 to $646 in seven days. Privacy coins usually move on their own schedule — this week they moved on everyone else's too. |
| 3 | LINK (Chainlink) | ~$12.40 | +30%+ | Broke back above $12 with ETF-inflow chatter pointing toward $16. The "boring one" strikes again. |
| 4 | SOL (Solana) | $93 | +25% | Pushing toward $100 as ETF inflows and improving liquidity conditions do the heavy lifting. |
| 5 | HYPE (Hyperliquid) | $77.62 | +30%+ | Fresh all-time high. From "Hyperliquid, now just liquid" two issues ago to a new record — markets move fast, mate. |
Not everyone got the invite to alt season — pour one out for these, and check none of them are sitting in your portfolio without a stop (Chapter 4 exists for a reason):
| # | Coin | Price | Move | Poida's take |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Humanity | — | −80%+ | A $32M private-key theft gutted this one overnight. A green week for the market means nothing if your own keys are the leak. |
| 2 | Maya Protocol | — | Halted | Six chained logic bugs, ~$1.7M drained, protocol paused. DeFi's version of finding out the servo pump was rigged the whole time. |
| 3 | BTW (Bitway) | — | Retreated | Pulled back hard from its record near $0.775 after last issue's incentive-driven rally cooled off. Classic buy-the-rumour, sell-the-staking-APR. |
| 4 | WLFI (World Liberty Financial) | $0.0586 | −4.66% | One of the only red tickers on an otherwise green board. Still stuck in the same range it's been boxed into for weeks. |
| 5 | UNI (Uniswap) | ~$3.3 | Flat/lagging | Barely moved while everything else mooned. DeFi's biggest DEX, missing DeFi's biggest week. |
Not tips. Not targets. Just three established, still-heavily-used networks trading a long way below their best days — the kind of thing a Chapter 6 DCA-and-hold Boganster researches while everyone else doom-scrolls. Do your own research, size by the 2% rule, and remember: cheap can always get cheaper.
Up 27% this week alone and still, even after that move, sitting just under half its 2021 all-time high near $4,900. It's still the road every DeFi shop, stablecoin and NFT project on this page is built on. Fee compression and L2 competition are real risks — this week's rally doesn't erase them — but the usage was never the problem, only the price was.
Up 25% this week and knocking on $100, backed by real ETF inflows and improving liquidity — yet still nowhere near its old highs near $260. A rally like this week's is exactly when "worth a look" can tip into "everyone's already looking" — do the maths on where you're buying, not just what's trending.
Sat this rally out almost entirely while XRP, ZEC and LINK partied — still more than 98% below its all-time high of $54.87. Either that's the market correctly writing it off, or it's the one still-cheap major that alt season hasn't reached yet. That's exactly what "do your own research" is for.
Market data: Liquid markets snapshot at time of writing. News & context: The Block — XRP leads altcoin rally, BTC's biggest weekly gain in two years · IG — Bitcoin breaks $69,000 on Treasury buyback news · CoinDesk — $3B in shorts wiped out as BTC tops $71,000 · Yahoo Finance — crypto surges after Trump pushes CLARITY Act · Bloomberg — Bitcoin leaps past $75,000 in Asia trading · CryptoTimes — altcoin market cap crosses $1 trillion · Milk Road — Fear & Greed Index, 72 (Aug 21) · Bitcoin Foundation — CLARITY Act vote pushed to September · FXStreet — Solana price forecast on ETF inflows. Prices are snapshots and move constantly.
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