The Weekly Wrap: A Turbulent Week

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This Week’s Top Stories

“Fireblocks denies report of $2.5 billion acquisition talks with Visa.” – Thursday, 22 October 2026 

• Fireblocks denied an Axios report on Thursday that Visa is in late stage talks to acquire the crypto custody and stablecoin infrastructure firm for around $2.5 billion. The report cited multiple sources. 
• Fireblocks was last publicly valued at $8 billion in January 2022, when it raised $550 million in a Series E funding round. 
• Such a transaction size would rank among the largest acquisitions in crypto industry history, below Coinbase's $2.9 billion purchase of derivatives exchange Deribit in 2025 

“JPMorgan issues first long-term bitcoin return forecast, projecting 10% annually.” – Tuesday, 20 October 2026. 

• J.P. Morgan Asset Management has issued its first 10-year return forecast for Bitcoin, projecting a 10% compounded annual return. 
• Additionally, they put Bitcoin's volatility at 55% and says unstable correlations still keep it out of most portfolios.

Bitcoin and the crypto market started the week slowly, with continued sideways price action into Tuesday morning. But then Bitcoin traded to the upside, reaching $85K on Wednesday evening before selling off again into Thursday evening. At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading at $81.5K, down almost 4% from its weekly high. 

LIT, WLD, PEPE, and DASH are among the top-performing assets within the top 100 projects by market capitalization, all up around 10% over the last seven days. ZRO, AERO, and STX, on the other hand, are the biggest losers, down almost 20%. 

The US stock market indices mirror the exact same price action as Bitcoin this week. Gold has lost quite a bit of ground since Monday, down almost 4 percent and trading just above $4K at the time of writing. Oil, on the other hand, is trading higher and approaching the September highs, as the conflicts in Iran and Ukraine do not appear likely to be resolved any time soon.

The Bitcoin spot ETFs experienced a mixed last couple of weeks, with one or two rather large outflow days at the beginning of the month, but also a day or two with more than $100M in inflows. This week, however, the BTC products recorded two days with more than $500M of net inflows, followed by the largest outflow day since June 25 this year, with $635M leaving the products. Interestingly, the outflows were split across different products, with $250M leaving IBIT, almost $220M leaving Fidelity’s FBTC, and $100M leaving ARKB. Monday’s $500M net inflow day was largely due to the $665M inflow into IBIT.

Solana core engineering firm Anza said its Alpenglow consensus protocol reached mainnet-beta on Wednesday. The protocol shift condenses Solana’s previous two-step transaction confirmation process into a single step, bringing finality down from 12.8 seconds to about 150 milliseconds for exchanges crediting deposits and merchants processing payments. 

In the Ethereum cryptoverse, the staked supply of Ethereum reached a new all-time high, with almost 44M Ether, or 36% of the supply, being staked. The last quarter marked the sixth consecutive quarter of net inflows into ETH staking. While the amount staked rose, staking rewards fell across the board. Solana ended the quarter with 69% of its supply staked at a 5.99% gross yield, down from 6.38%. NEAR had 46% of its supply staked at a 4.87% yield, and Ethereum had 35.9% staked at 2.63%, down from 2.81%. Hyperliquid had 436 million HYPE staked at 2.24%, broadly unchanged.

Strategy acquired 267 BTC last week at an average price of almost $83K. The company also repurchased 1.94M STRC shares. BitMine also bought another 12.5K Ether, inching closer to its goal of holding 5% of the total ETH supply. 

The spot ETFs closed last week with net outflows across the board. This week, as mentioned earlier, the Bitcoin spot ETFs already saw two days with net inflows of more than $500M. The last time the Bitcoin products saw two $500M+ inflow days in a week was back in August this year. On Thursday, however, the BTC spot ETFs saw net outflows of more than $600M, erasing more than half of the weekly inflows in a single day. The Ethereum, Solana and Hyperliquid spot ETFs are currently on track for another week of net outflows, while the Zcash spot ETF is slightly in the positive. 

In other news, FINMA has approved Switzerland’s first spot Bitcoin ETF for retail investors, allowing a fund to invest directly in BTC under Swiss investment fund rules. Additionally, BlackRock filed for a Bitcoin fund that would give investors both downside protection and upside exposure to its flagship iShares Bitcoin spot ETF.

The CNN Fear and Greed Index shows an extreme fear reading of 20, down from values in the 30s last week. The AAII sentiment survey confirms this bearish sentiment: almost 46% of its members feel bearish about the stock market over the coming six months, while the number of bullish members fell to 37%, down from almost 39% last week. The Crypto Fear and Greed Index is back in neutral territory at 50, after multiple weeks of readings in greedy territory.

• Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) plans to remove “Crypto” from the name of its flagship blockchain fund. – Link 
• Visa in talks to acquire Fireblocks for around $2.5B. – Link 
• Mt. Gox has extended its creditor repayment deadline by another year to October 31, 2027. – Link

Last week, we highlighted the resilience of the crypto market despite the negative news flow and difficult macro environment. This resilience continued this week, as Bitcoin continues to trade around the important $82K level. Market participants are closely watching the current price action, as a drop below $80K would likely open the door to a move lower toward the $75K September low. 

Next week, the Fed’s interest rate decision is coming up, with Polymarket odds suggesting that rates will remain unchanged (94% probability). Chances of a 25 bps increase are currently sitting at 6%. 

Below, you can find some of the key data releases and events to watch out for next week. 

Tuesday, 27 October 2026 

• USA – House Price Index 

Wednesday, 28 October 2026 

• USA – Fed Interest Rate Decision, FOMC Meeting 
• Canada – BOC Interest Rate Decision, Press Conference 

Thursday, 29 October 

• USA – GDP 
• USA – Initial Jobless Claims 
• USA – PCE Price Index, Core PCE Price Index 
• Eurozone – ECB Interest Rate Decision, Press Conference 

Friday, 30 October 

• Japan – BoJ Interest Rate Decision, Policy Statement