Monthly Crypto Roundup by CoinsDo: August 2026

Bitcoin rose roughly 24% in August, its best month since November 2024 and its best August since 2017, against a historical August median of about negative 7%. Ether did better, up 32.5%. Spot bitcoin ETFs took in $3.52 billion, twenty times July's total and the strongest month of 2026.

Almost none of that was bought by the crypto market. Futures open interest fell while the price climbed. Spot volumes stayed near three-year lows. The two largest single-day advances of the month land on 19 and 20 August, immediately after the SEC published its first crypto rulemaking and the President publicly pushed the Senate to pass the CLARITY Act.

What August repriced was US policy risk. Demand stayed where it was in July. That distinction matters, because a Senate procedural vote in September can move policy risk back the other way.

Market Performance

Bitcoin

Bitcoin opened August around $62,800, in line with July's close, and spent the first half of the month range-bound between roughly $62,000 and $65,000. It closed near $78,800 after touching an intramonth high above $81,000, a gain of roughly 24%.

That leaves bitcoin about 37% below the $126,080 all-time high set in October 2025, and roughly 10% down year to date.

The move itself is the interesting part. Futures open interest fell from 645,760 BTC on 14 August to 587,584 BTC by 25 August, a decline of about 58,000 BTC while the spot price ran from around $62,000 to $80,000. Price up, open interest down, is the signature of short covering rather than new leveraged buying. Funding rates on perpetuals stayed below 10% annualised throughout, which says traders were not aggressively opening fresh longs either. On 20 August alone, bearish positions lost roughly $3 billion.

Spot turnover stayed near September 2023 lows for the whole month. Whale wallets added about 60,000 BTC.

US spot bitcoin ETFs took in a net $3.52 billion, against $172.4 million in July. The complex recorded inflows on 16 of 21 trading days, including nine consecutive sessions from 17 to 27 August. Year to date net redemptions fell from $5.29 billion to $1.77 billion, and assets under management rose from $76.29 billion at the end of July to $99.61 billion at the end of August.

Then on 2 September the products bled $236.46 million in a single day, the largest daily outflow since 31 July.

Ethereum

Ether gained 32.5%, rebounding from early-month lows near $1,900 to close above $2,400. It was the second consecutive positive month after a drawdown of nearly 70% between October and June.

Spot ether ETFs took in $1.85 billion, the best month in more than a year, with 11 consecutive inflow days at month end and only four negative days in total. BlackRock's ETHA accounted for about $1.02 billion of that, roughly 72%. The single largest day was $225.8 million on 27 August, the strongest since October 2025.

Wallet-cohort data shows who was doing what. Wallets holding 10,000 to 100,000 ETH accumulated 430,000 ETH over the month. Wallets holding 100 to 1,000 ETH sold 447,000, and the 1,000 to 10,000 band distributed another 292,000. Retail and mid-tier holders sold into institutional accumulation, near realised prices of $2,350 and $2,260, which means most of them got out roughly level rather than at a profit.

A further 1.4 million ETH went into staking contracts, the largest monthly addition since February 2024.

Total crypto market capitalisation reached $2.82 trillion by 3 September, its highest since January and still around 34% below the October 2025 peak of $4.27 trillion.

Points of Interest

The SEC wrote the rule Congress could not pass

On 18 August the SEC proposed Regulation Crypto Assets, its first substantive crypto rulemaking. The proposal had been pending at the White House regulatory review office since April and was targeted for July. A commission meeting scheduled for 14 August to vote on it was cancelled for what the agency called an unforeseen scheduling issue, and the proposal appeared four days later without one.

The substance is a capital-formation regime with an exit ramp. Rule 200 creates a startup exemption capped at $5 million, usable once per issuer, open to retail investors and general solicitation, available for four years. Rules 300 to 307 add a two-tier offering exemption at $20 million and $75 million in any 12-month period, the second requiring financial statements and ongoing reporting, both requiring the issuer to be US-organised with a majority of executives resident in the US and more than half of assets held there.

Rule 400 is the part that matters most. A covered investment contract is deemed to have ceased to exist once the issuer has completed or permanently abandoned the managerial efforts it originally promised and has filed a Form TR. The token then operates outside securities law.

Chair Paul Atkins framed it as "a package of exemptions that would facilitate capital formation and allow crypto asset innovation to flourish in the United States in the years ahead." He also said, in the same announcement, that "legislation remains indispensable to enacting 'future-proofed' rules of the road."

Read that second sentence again. The regulator publishing the rule is saying the rule is not enough. A 60-day comment period runs from Federal Register publication, and a proposal is not a final rule.

The Senate started a clock it may not beat

On 8 August, Majority Leader John Thune filed a motion to proceed on the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, calendar number 423, opening the cloture process. No vote was taken. The first procedural vote was set for the Senate's return in September.

The arithmetic has not improved since July. Cloture needs 60 votes against 53 Republican seats, which means at least 10 Democrats. The disputes are the same ones that stalled it before the recess: an ethics provision barring senior officials from backing crypto projects, illicit-finance protections, and contested stablecoin rewards language. The revised ethics proposal still needs White House sign-off.

On 20 August the President publicly pressed the Senate to pass it. Bitcoin opened that day at $69,289.44, up 7.1% on the previous session, and reached $71,980.32 by 9:15am ET. Ether opened at $2,251.93, up 17.5%, its single largest day of the month.

A 17.5% move in ether on a presidential statement about a bill that has not been voted on is a market with very little else to price.

MiCA started producing bank custodians

The EU register's August entries are the first clear evidence of what the end of grandfathering actually produces. Deutsche WertpapierService Bank AG (dwpbank), the securities services utility behind much of Germany's cooperative and savings bank sector, was authorised for custody and administration, crypto-to-fiat and crypto-to-crypto exchange, and transfer services.

Nine German cooperative banks were authorised in the same month for execution of client orders only, with no custody permission: VBU Volksbank im Unterland, VR-Bank Erding, Volksbank Beilstein-Ilsfeld-Abstatt, Raiffeisenbank Aidlingen, Volksbank Euskirchen, Ihre Volksbank Neckar Odenwald Main Tauber, VR-Bank Mittelfranken Mitte, VR Bank Ried-Überwald and Volksbank Backnang.

That split is the story. The banks took the customer-facing permission and left custody to the utility that already runs their securities infrastructure. It is the same division of labour European banks have used for securities for decades, arriving in digital assets through the licence structure rather than through a strategy document. Firms selling custody into European banks should expect to be selling to a small number of shared infrastructure providers rather than to each bank.

Elsewhere, Dubai's VARA granted full VASP licences on 7 August to DIMENT VA Exchange Services, ARP Digital and Flowdesk Omega, all broker-dealer, with conditional in-principle approvals including Cregis Custody for custody services.

Japan licensed an exchange for the first time in four years

On 21 August the FSA registered Laser Digital Japan, the Nomura-backed digital asset arm, as a crypto-asset exchange service provider. It is the first new registration in roughly four years, ending a pause that dates to Japan's post-hack tightening in 2022. The firm will start by supplying wholesale liquidity to existing domestic VASPs before moving into institutional services.

The timing follows July's amendments moving crypto from the Payment Services Act into the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act, with implementing rules expected in 2027. A regulator that spent four years refusing new entrants approved a bank-affiliated one a month after reclassifying the asset as a financial instrument. The order of those two events is not accidental.

The Coldcard number kept climbing

July's roundup put the Coldcard seed-generation exploit at roughly $70 million. By 3 August the figure had reached $116 million, and by 4 August more than $130 million.

Two details from the follow-up reporting change the shape of the incident. First, at least a dozen separate attackers were working the same vulnerability independently, so this was a race to drain a known-vulnerable keyspace rather than a single intrusion. Second, the flawed code path had been present since 2021, meaning five years of seeds generated on affected builds. Block's security team documented the mechanism as a predictable RNG fallback with a 32-bit reseed.

Coinkite's patch still only protects newly generated seeds. Anyone holding a seed created on an affected device and build has not been made safe by the fix.

Strategy bought back what it sold, $20,000 higher

Strategy sold 1,690 BTC on 10 August and raised $653 million from MSTR share issuance. On 17 August it sold a further $334 million in shares, made no bitcoin transactions, and reported a USD reserve of $4.8 billion.

On 31 August it bought roughly $370 million of bitcoin at an average of about $80,300, its first purchase in two months. Over the summer it had sold approximately $544 million across four transactions with bitcoin near $58,500.

The company sold near the low and repurchased near the high, and it is the best-capitalised holder in the category. That sequence follows directly from how the model is funded. A balance sheet that buys bitcoin with proceeds from equity issuance has to transact when the equity window is open, and the equity window opens when the price is rising.

Stablecoin supply stopped falling, roughly

Total stablecoin supply stood at $302.9 billion on 7 September, against $307.6 billion in early August. USDT was $183.4 billion and USDC $74.4 billion, the latter up from $72.1 billion.

The headline is a fourth consecutive month of contraction. The composition says something different: USDC grew while the aggregate fell. The structural cause identified in July has not changed, since the GENIUS Act still bars licensed issuers from paying yield on a digital dollar. What appears to be happening is a rotation toward the regulated issuer rather than an exit from the instrument.

Macro Backdrop

August is the month crypto stopped trading macro.

Fed Chair Kevin Warsh gave his first Jackson Hole address on 28 August, on his hundredth day in office, and it was hawkish. "Inflation is running above our 2 percent target," he said. "So the Fed's predominant focus right now should be on prices." He went further: "The responsibility for 65 months of sustained, elevated inflation sits squarely with the central bank." He declined to commit to any rate path, arguing that forward guidance constrains flexibility.

The target range held at 3.50% to 3.75%. Going into the 16 September FOMC, odds of a hike were running around one in three, and three committee members had already dissented in July in favour of an immediate increase.

Crypto rallied through all of it.

The same indifference showed up on trade. On 22 August the US imposed 50% tariffs on $20 billion of Canadian goods after three days of talks in Washington collapsed, covering electronics, industrial machinery, dairy, steel, lumber, autos, paper and appliances. Prime Minister Mark Carney announced dollar-for-dollar retaliation. Carney said the US had proposed terms that were "uneconomic, unfair and undermined the net benefits." US Trade Representative Greer said Canada "declined to finalise the trade deal under the terms agreed earlier this week."

A hawkish Fed and a 50% tariff wall between the two largest trading partners in North America, and bitcoin had its best August since 2017.

Final Thoughts

The unifying theme of August is that this market has one variable left.

Every leg of the move maps to a Washington date. The 19th, when the SEC proposal landed. The 20th, when the President pushed the bill. The nine-session ETF inflow run that starts on the 17th and ends on the 27th. Monetary policy turned hawkish and was ignored. A trade war escalated and was ignored. Open interest fell while price rose, which means a meaningful share of the gain was shorts closing rather than anyone buying with conviction.

None of that makes the rally fake. Ether ETFs took real money, whales accumulated real coins, 1.4 million ETH went into staking contracts and will not be liquid soon. Underneath the price, the authorisation machinery kept grinding: a German bank utility cleared for custody, nine banks cleared for order execution, Japan's first new exchange registration since 2022, a Dubai custody approval in principle. That layer does not care what bitcoin did in August, and it is the layer institutional buyers are actually exposed to.

But the price is now leveraged to a legislative calendar. The CLARITY Act needs 10 Democratic votes it does not have, on a procedural motion in September. Regulation Crypto Assets is a proposal with a 60-day comment period, and the Chair who wrote it said in the same breath that legislation remains indispensable. On 2 September, the day after the month ended, the bitcoin ETF complex posted its largest outflow since July.

August priced in a bill that has not passed. September is where the market finds out what that was worth.