Institutional buyers pause, Bitcoin slides, Cipher pivots

Bitcoin opened the week under pressure, dipping to 105,000 dollars and triggering 191 million dollars in liquidations within an hour. Altcoins followed lower, with Solana near 166 and Ethereum trading around 3,500. Open interest slid back to 33 billion dollars after peaking late last week, while fear gauges hovered near neutral territory.

This pullback coincides with a slowdown in Bitcoin’s deepest demand channels. Data from Capriole Investments and CryptoQuant show that institutional buying has fallen below newly mined supply for the first time in seven months. Corporate treasuries and ETF flows that once anchored Bitcoin’s floor are now fading under tighter liquidity and rising real yields.

It's wildly profitable - Over $3 billion in operating income. It has a partnership with the hottest AI stock on Wall Street.

And Trump has publicly backed it? 

Get the details on #1 AI energy stock here.

Michael Saylor’s Strategy, the largest corporate Bitcoin holder, added just 43,000 BTC in the third quarter, its smallest purchase this year. The slowdown mirrors shrinking market premiums that once made share issuance an easy source of capital. 

CryptoQuant data show the company’s net asset value premium collapsing from 208 percent to 4 percent, sharply reducing incentive to raise funds for more purchases.

Similar constraints are appearing elsewhere. Japan’s Metaplanet now trades below its own Bitcoin book value, and smaller treasury firms like Semler Scientific have merged to preserve access to liquidity. 

ETFs are showing fatigue too, with October’s early 6 billion dollars in inflows giving way to 2 billion dollars in redemptions by month-end.

The result is a thinner structural bid. Without steady ETF creation or corporate accumulation, Bitcoin’s price action again depends on shorter-term positioning and macro conditions.

As Bitcoin adjusts to shifting demand, a quieter but more existential risk is resurfacing. 

The Human Rights Foundation released new findings on quantum computing, warning that roughly 6.5 million BTC are vulnerable to long-range attacks against older or reused address types. Researchers estimate that 1.7 million BTC, including Satoshi’s coins, could be exposed once quantum computing reaches practical strength.

Proposed defenses such as lattice-based and hash-based signatures would enlarge transactions and strain the blockchain, forcing a political test of Bitcoin’s capacity to coordinate upgrades. Developers, node operators, and wallet makers face the same challenge: modernize without fracturing consensus.

Not every great buy-and-hold stock is a household name. Our 7 Stocks to Buy and Hold Forever report includes under-the-radar leaders quietly dominating their niches - alongside global brands with unmatched staying power. 

Together, they form a portfolio core that can produce rising income and steady growth year after year. 

You can get the entire list free today… but only if you act before it moves behind the paywall.

While Bitcoin’s liquidity picture softens, one former miner is capitalizing on the opposite trend. Cipher Mining announced a 5.5 billion dollar, 15-year lease agreement with Amazon Web Services to supply 300 megawatts of data center capacity for AI workloads. The deal, part of an 8.5 billion dollar portfolio of AI-related contracts, lifted Cipher’s stock 19 percent on Monday.

The company’s pivot underscores a larger shift within the mining sector. As token margins compress and power costs rise, miners are redeploying energy assets toward steady-revenue hosting for AI and cloud clients. Cipher’s Colchis development in West Texas adds another gigawatt to that pipeline, targeting full operation by 2028.

Bitcoin’s support layers are changing. ETF inflows are now cyclical rather than constant, corporate treasuries face capital constraints, and miners are migrating toward AI infrastructure. Meanwhile, the long-range quantum threat adds a new strategic horizon to watch.

The coming months will show whether this pause in accumulation is a breather within a larger uptrend or the start of a more volatile phase driven by macro liquidity and technology transitions that reach far beyond crypto itself.