Bitcoin Hits Ludicrous Speed, Congress Sings Kumbaya, and Memecoins Throw a House Party

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Hey DegenDen,

Dr.P is back! What a ride. Bitcoin did not just nudge a ceiling this week, it ripped the roof clean off, peaking at $118,600 and vaporizing a billion dollars in shorts.

In Washington, lawmakers suddenly decided crypto deserves its own “week,” DeFi took a gut punch, and memecoins pumped like carnival balloons on dollar-day. If you blinked, you missed at least three plot twists.

First, the vibe check on the majors:

• Bitcoin (BTC) – $117 735 (24 h: +5.8 %)

• Ethereum (ETH) – $2 980.38 (24 h: +7.5 %)

• XRP (XRP) – $2.91 (24 h: +19.0 %)

• BNB (BNB) – $691.59 (24 h: +3.4 %)

• Solana (SOL) – $165.21 (24 h: +5.5 %)
  

Greed is firmly back on the menu.

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THE RUNDOWN

Regulators Blink
Treasury deleted the broker rule. The House lined up three landmark bills for a freshly christened “Crypto Week.” Senator Cruz says freedom is back on the blockchain and, for once, CT believed him.

DeFi Shakeout
GMX v1 leaked forty-plus million dollars when a design quirk met a clever attacker. Forks slammed the brakes, TVL fell off a cliff, and every Discord server learned what “re-entrancy” means the hard way.

AI Tokens Reload
Nvidia strolled into the four-trillion club and suddenly TAO, RENDER, and friends jumped eight percent. DePIN tokens now trade at thrift-store multiples while their revenues keep crawling upward.

Corporate Treasuries Try Ether
SharpLink shoveled half a billion into ETH, Bit Digital swapped its entire Bitcoin pile for 100 000 ether, and the analyst chorus discovered the phrase “real yield” like it was new.

Memecoin Circus
 Pump.fun wants six hundred million dollars for a token sale after already banking seven hundred million in fees. Justin Sun answered by pledging another hundred million to TRUMP. Irony lives.

Macro Wild Card
Copper tariffs at fifty percent drove a thirteen percent single-day price pop. The dollar index hit a twenty-one-year low, and a Treasury liquidity drain looms. Liquidity out, hard money in.

MAIN EVENT: BITCOIN BREAKS THE SPEED LIMIT

Imagine a freight train welded to a rocket sled. That was Bitcoin all week.

Late Monday, bids started stacking like Lego bricks. By Thursday afternoon New York time the chart printed a shiny $118,600.

More than a billion dollars in shorts vanished, including Hyperliquid’s James Wynn, last seen bragging about forty-times leverage at $112 000.

He now stars in every liquidations meme thread.

Spot ETF inflows raced past fifty billion dollars. BlackRock’s IBIT alone sits on seven hundred thousand bitcoins, already one of its three best-earning funds. Saylor crowed that “winter is not coming back,” and for once even the snark accounts nodded.

Trump keeps tweeting laser eyes. Congress is preparing the most crypto-friendly week in Capitol history. Repealing the broker rule felt like a choke collar unbuckled. Arthur Hayes summed it up in one line: “The boomers finally found the orange button.”

Funding rates hover near ten percent, a far cry from the melt-your-face fifty percent seen in past peaks.

The MVRV Z-Score sits at 2.4, nowhere near the seven-plus that calls the top. Volatility keeps slipping lower while accumulator wallets climbed seventy-one percent this year to two hundred forty-eight thousand bitcoin.

Every dip met a concrete wall of bids.

Macro added jet fuel. The dollar slid, copper tariffs screamed inflation, and the Federal Reserve may have to pause quantitative tightening once the Treasury General Account sucks five hundred billion from bank reserves. When fiat looks shaky, Bitcoin looks shiny.

What could spoil the party?

A seven percent difficulty hike is due next adjustment, leverage is coming slowly, and the $120,000 call wall on Deribit carries two billion in open interest.

A sharp macro shock could still knock out weak longs. Yet every structural metric points higher until fresh supply finally meets serious profit-taking, a zone analysts peg between $130,000 and $140,000.

In short, Bitcoin stared down institutions, regulators, and macro headwinds, then hit the gas anyway. Momentum favors the bulls, and the market knows it.

DEEPER CUTS

DeFi’s Security Gut Check

GMX v1’s forty-million bleed is a textbook case in the cost of complexity. One overlooked price-update rule and a well-timed re-entrancy call pulled funds in a single atomic swoop.

The hacker bridged to Ethereum, swapped into DAI, then vanished.

GMX offered a ten percent bounty for the return of ninety percent. Meanwhile every forked protocol raced to disable leverage. Good audits are not optional.

Tokenizing the World, One Share at a Time

Robinhood’s European “tokenized stocks” launch saw a wave of private firms asking to tokenize equity. SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce reminded everyone via a statement, those tokens are still securities. Gates Group wants to tokenize seventy-five million dollars of Tokyo real estate on Oasys. Regulators juggle the same question: when is a token truly backed, and when is it a glorified wager?

AI Meets Crypto

Modelz.io opened its exchange for AI models. Anyone can mint a token tied to open-source models and collect fees on API calls. DeXe is staking reputation tokens for AI agents. MantleX wants to be the layer where on-chain AI lives. The thesis is simple. GPUs are scarce, data is king, and decentralization is the carrot luring developers away from closed silos.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Bitcoin proved it can sprint in thick policy fog. Congress is suddenly friendly, but DeFi exploits remind us trust is still time-boxed.

AI and tokenization are pushing new frontiers while memecoins pour gasoline on crowd psychology. The market is wild, but under the noise capital keeps flowing in the same direction: deeper into crypto.

If you want a five-minute recap every weekday, waiting for DegenDen’s next Friday’s chaos report, slide into and subscribe to Osiris News. Sharp insights, zero fluff, a bit tamer Dr. P attitude.

Catch you next week.

Dr. P & the DegenDen Team