Over the course of the month, Bitcoin recovered from the $64,000 region and briefly rose above $81,000. However, by the last weekend of August, the momentum had weakened: following a speech by Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh, prices fell to $76,877 and have not yet returned to their recent highs.
At the time of writing, digital gold is trading at around $78,000. Rising expectations of a US interest rate hike are putting pressure on risk assets. The market estimates the probability of such a decision at the 16 September meeting at approximately 64 per cent, according to CME FedWatch.
Spot volumes have remained near three-year lows
Despite August’s strong performance, there has not yet been a broad recovery in trading activity.
A CryptoQuant analyst going by the pseudonym Darkfost noted that spot Bitcoin trading volumes on the largest centralised exchanges remain near the lows of September 2023.
On Binance, the figure for August 2026 stood at around $44 billion, compared with $198 billion in October 2025. On Gate, volume fell from $53.4 billion to $14 billion, and on Bybit from $41.2 billion to $17.4 billion. On average, the decline across the three platforms reached approximately 70 per cent.
However, the decline in activity has stopped accelerating. Binance’s volume was approximately $1.6 billion higher than in July, whilst figures for other major platforms have generally stabilised compared with the previous month. Darkfost described this as the first sign that the downturn is coming to a halt.
Large wallets have increased their BTC holdings
The August growth was accompanied by a redistribution of bitcoins in favour of large holders. According to CryptoQuant, between 1 and 30 August, wallets with balances exceeding 100 BTC increased their holdings by approximately 60,000 BTC.
At the same time, addresses holding between 1 and 100 BTC reduced their holdings by approximately 33,000 BTC, whilst holders of less than 1 BTC cut their holdings by a further 14,000 BTC. Purchases by major players accelerated after Bitcoin broke out of the $62,000–$65,000 range on 19 August. By 30 August, the analyst had not observed any signs of a mass sell-off of the coins they had accumulated.
Glassnode has noted mixed signals
Institutional demand, however, remains steady. Glassnode noted continued inflows into US Bitcoin ETFs and the profitability of most positions in these instruments.
At the same time, analysts noted a cooling off in the spot market and the retail sector. Exchange trading volumes have fallen, whilst the number of active addresses and the total amount of fees have decreased slightly, although on-chain transaction volumes remain elevated.
In the derivatives market, by contrast, speculative sentiment is on the rise: interest in options is growing, whilst the spread between implied and realised volatility is narrowing.
According to Glassnode’s assessment, the current phase is transitional in nature: sustained institutional demand and improvements in a number of on-chain metrics are occurring alongside rising leverage, waning retail interest and the first signs of coin distribution, writes forklog.com.
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