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Bull cycle

Bitcoin notches new record high amid “Uptober” surge

Bitcoin surged over $125,500 for the first time on Saturday.

Yaël Bizouati-Kennedy

Uptober has arrived.

Bitcoin reached an all-time high on Saturday, crossing $125,500 for the first time not even two months after hitting its previous record. The asset is up over 100% in the past year.

Kyle Chassé, founder of MV Global, told Sherwood News that this all‑time high is being driven from the top down.

“Spot ETF flows are vacuuming up supply every day — that’s the clearest sign Wall Street is here. ‘Uptober’ helps, and the market is shrugging off the shutdown headlines and political noise because bitcoin is the neutral, non‑sovereign asset people use as insurance against policy risk and fiat debasement,” Chassé said.

He said that if ETF inflows keep soaking up coins anywhere near current run rates, reaching $145,000 by year‑end is “very doable.”

“Volatility will pop up, but the base case for this bull cycle is solid,” he said.

Lucas Kiely, founder of Future Digital Capital Management, noted that caution is warranted at this point in the cycle.

“Euphoria leads to leverage, and bigger price swings put overleveraged traders at risk of liquidations. This can easily lead to liquidation cascades, wiping out traders who have taken on too much uncalculated risk,” he said.

Meanwhile, bitcoin ETF inflows had their second-best week since inception in January 2024, raking in $3.2 billion. BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust, with $95 billion in assets under management, continues to lead the pack, seeing $1.8 billion in inflows last week.

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Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

$389M

US Attorney David Metcalf announced Thursday the arrests of Ruslan Igorevich Tkachuk and Alexander Vladimirovich Ledenev, alleged senior members of AudiA6, a cryptocurrency money-laundering service believed to be responsible for laundering over $389 million.

The arrests coincided with a coordinated international takedown of AudiA6 and its infrastructure, involving the search of three properties, the seizure of servers and domains connected to the organization, as well as freezing cryptocurrency assets, according to a Department of Justice press release.

Tkachuk and Ledenev were “charged by criminal complaint with one count of conspiracy to launder monetary instruments and one count of sting money laundering,” the DOJ said. If convicted, they face a maximum possible sentence of 20 years of incarceration.

Per the criminal complaint, AudiA6 offered services to conceal the origin of cryptocurrency linked to criminal activity, charging fees of up to 5% of the amount laundered.

The two defendants are in custody of Republic of Georgia authorities, and the US Attorney’s Office aims to seek their extradition to the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

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