Bitcoin is bouncing hard off the low sixties, reclaiming sixty-eight five as the dollar weakens and a potential rotation out of gold builds momentum. Meanwhile, the AI coding wars are in full swing — Cursor just dropped a major update, and the battle between agentic coding tools is reshaping how software gets built. Strategy just hit its hundredth Bitcoin purchase, now holding over seven hundred thousand BTC, while the rest of the corporate treasury space has gone eerily quiet. And on the TradFi front, Goldman Sachs' CEO admits he owns Bitcoin, US spot ETFs are seeing inflows again, and Coinbase just opened stock and ETF trading to all its US users. Let's get into it.
The AI coding tool landscape is becoming genuinely competitive, and this week Cursor made a big move. The company announced a significant update to its AI-first IDE — better code generation, tighter integration with development environments, and a smoother overall experience. This matters because the agentic coding space is no longer a novelty. It's a real market with real money flowing in.
Let me break down where things stand. You've got three serious contenders right now. GitHub Copilot is still the most widely used — ten bucks a month, great inline completions, dead simple to use. It's the default for a lot of developers. Then there's Cursor at twenty a month, which is basically a souped-up VS Code fork where the AI can directly manipulate your code across multiple files. And then Claude Code from Anthropic, also around twenty a month, which takes a completely different approach — it's terminal-based, agent-first, and with the new Opus 4.6 model, it's become remarkably capable at handling complex multi-file refactoring and architectural changes.
What's interesting is how these tools reflect the broader shift in AI from chatbots to what people are calling agentic AI. We're moving past the era where AI just answers questions. These coding assistants now plan, execute multi-step tasks, verify outcomes, and iterate. The competitive edge isn't in prompting anymore — it's in designing the workflows, the governance, the permissions around how these agents operate. Google's pushing this with Gemini, Anthropic with Claude Code Security.
For developers, the practical reality is that most serious users are spending sixty to two hundred dollars a month on these tools because the time savings in coding, debugging, and code review dwarf the subscription cost. The choice really depends on your workflow. If you want an autonomous coding partner that can handle your CI/CD pipeline, Claude Code is compelling. If you want a supercharged IDE where you stay in control, Cursor is probably your pick. And if you just want solid completions without much friction, Copilot still works. The point is, all three are getting better fast, and the gap between human-only coding and AI-assisted coding is widening every month.
Let's talk about Bitcoin's price action because the picture is complicated. Bitcoin dipped to around sixty-two seven hundred earlier this week, printing its most oversold weekly RSI reading on record — roughly 25.7. That's historically been a cycle bottom signal. And sure enough, we got a bounce. BTC climbed back above sixty-eight five hundred on the back of a weaker dollar, rebounding US equities, and what some analysts are calling a bullish rotation out of gold.
But zoom out and the context is sobering. Bitcoin is heading toward a potential fifth consecutive monthly loss, which would be unprecedented in the post-ETF era. Only about forty-one percent of Bitcoin supply is in profit right now, threatening the worst halving cycle on record. Since October 2025, roughly eight and a half billion dollars has been pulled from US-listed Bitcoin ETFs, and futures exposure on the CME has dropped by two-thirds from its peak.
There are some green shoots though. Spot Bitcoin ETFs posted two hundred fifty-eight million in inflows on Tuesday, led by Fidelity and BlackRock. The Hash Ribbon indicator, which tracks miner capitulation, is showing signs of recovery — one of the longest miner capitulations on record may be nearing its end. Public miners sold over five thousand BTC last month as winter power costs bit into margins, but that forced selling could be washing out.
The key level everyone's watching is sixty-five thousand. If Bitcoin holds above it, the argument for a double bottom and recovery toward seventy thousand gets stronger. If it breaks below, fifty-eight thousand comes into view, and the conversation shifts to a deeper crypto winter. Adam Back, whose work is literally cited in the Bitcoin white paper, weighed in this week saying volatility like this is typical even as regulatory clarity and institutional access expand. The infrastructure is better than it's ever been. The price just hasn't caught up yet.
On the corporate treasury front, Strategy — formerly MicroStrategy — just made its hundredth Bitcoin purchase, picking up 592 BTC for about forty million dollars. That brings their total holdings to roughly seven hundred eighteen thousand Bitcoin, valued at around forty-seven billion. Here's the jaw-dropping stat: Strategy accounted for over ninety-nine percent of all corporate Bitcoin buying last week. The rest of the sector added fewer than five Bitcoin combined. Mining companies reported zero acquisitions.
This is the most concentrated corporate buying we've ever tracked, and it raises important questions. Strategy is doing what no one else will right now — buying into weakness with conviction. But the flip side is real. The company is sitting on an eight billion dollar unrealized loss and has increased equity issuance by over four times since 2020 to fund these purchases. Strategy has also become the most heavily shorted large-cap US stock, with short interest at fourteen percent of market cap. Though Goldman Sachs data suggests much of that short positioning may be basis trades rather than pure bearish bets.
Meanwhile, there's interesting movement around the edges. Anchorage Digital, the only federally chartered US crypto bank, added Strategy's preferred stock to its own balance sheet. And 21Shares just listed a Strategy Yield ETP on Euronext Amsterdam, giving European investors regulated access to Strategy's Bitcoin-backed preferred stock. On the other side of the ledger, GD Culture, a smaller Bitcoin treasury firm, announced it's selling BTC holdings to fund share buybacks after its stock lost two-thirds of its value.
The broader picture from River's 2025 adoption report is actually encouraging. Institutions accumulated over eight hundred thousand BTC last year despite a fifty percent price drop. Sixty percent of top US banks are developing Bitcoin products. Merchant adoption tripled. Lightning Network payments grew three hundred percent, processing over a billion dollars monthly. Five new nation-states started holding Bitcoin. The adoption story is real — it's the price that hasn't cooperated.
Traditional finance's march into crypto continues to accelerate, even as the market bleeds. Let's start with the big number: US spot crypto ETFs now hold a hundred and seventy billion dollars in total assets under management. Bitcoin products alone account for a hundred twenty-three billion, representing about six point four percent of total circulating supply. BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust holds nearly fifty-eight billion. These aren't experiments anymore. This is infrastructure.
Goldman Sachs' David Solomon made headlines by admitting he personally owns Bitcoin — his words were 'very, very limited' — but the bank's Q4 13F filing tells a more interesting story. Goldman holds a two point three six billion dollar crypto portfolio. They cut their iShares Bitcoin Trust position by nearly forty percent but increased their Strategy stock position by eleven percent. That's a deliberate pivot from direct Bitcoin exposure to a leveraged equity play on Bitcoin. Read into that what you will.
Major US banks — JPMorgan, Citi, Bank of America — are now offering Bitcoin access to over fifteen thousand wealth advisers. Endowments are testing Bitcoin and Ether allocations as expected returns on traditional assets compress. Coinbase just opened stock and ETF trading to all US users, blurring the line between crypto exchange and traditional brokerage.
On the regulatory side, the UK Financial Conduct Authority selected four firms including Revolut to test stablecoin issuance in its sandbox starting this quarter. The EU's ESMA warned that crypto perpetual derivatives likely fall under existing contracts-for-difference rules. And in the US, while the CFTC loosens leverage rules, multiple fintech firms including Payoneer and Coinbase are lining up for bank charters. Circle absolutely crushed its Q4 earnings — forty-three cents per share versus sixteen cents expected — with USDC supply topping seventy-five billion. The stock surged nearly thirty percent. The stablecoin rails are becoming the connective tissue between traditional and crypto finance, and the institutions building on them are being rewarded.
Here's the thought to sit with. River's data shows Bitcoin adoption surged across every measurable dimension in 2025 — institutions, banks, merchants, nations, Lightning usage — all while the price dropped fifty percent from its peak. That kind of divergence between adoption and price doesn't last forever. Either the adoption thesis is wrong, or the price is mispriced. Given that sixty percent of top US banks are now building Bitcoin products and a hundred seventy billion sits in spot ETFs, the simpler explanation might just be that the market is working through a painful but temporary repricing. The infrastructure being built right now, from AI coding tools accelerating development to institutional on-ramps going live at scale, is laying the foundation for whatever comes next. That's it for today. I'm out.