I check crypto prices way more often than I should. This week, every time I looked, Bitcoin was sitting around $83,000 like it was waiting for a bus. Meanwhile other things were exploding, getting hacked, or getting blocked in the Senate. Let me go through it.

Bitget got hacked, and I wasn't that shocked

I was scrolling through crypto news on Telegram, half paying attention, when the Bitget headline stopped me cold. I actually read it twice to make sure I hadn't misread the number.

Here's what happened. On September 24, someone drained a chunk of Bitget's wallets. Depending on who you ask, somewhere between $350 and $390 million is gone. Withdrawals were frozen, the CEO went live for hours, and the exchange says the hole is fixed and its protection fund covers the loss. Withdrawals started coming back on September 28.

My first reaction was the normal one: wait, what? That's a huge amount from one of the biggest exchanges out there. But a minute later I caught myself shrugging. This is crypto. There's a whole dark side of this world where people sit around looking for bugs and security holes, and sometimes they find one. I'm not saying Bitget was careless, and nobody knows the full story yet. I'm saying that after a while in this market, "can this happen?" stopped being my question. Now it's "who's next?"

It also made me more serious about my plan to keep my coins in a wallet I control. An exchange is a convenient place to buy. I don't want it to be where my coins live long term.

Why Bitcoin is stuck

The short version: the Fed raised interest rates on September 16, for the first time since 2023. It was a small hike, a quarter point, up to 3.75%–4%, but the signal was loud. Inflation is still annoying, and the 10-year US Treasury yield has climbed to around 5.3%, the highest in almost two decades.

When safe money pays that well, nobody is in a hurry to chase risky stuff. So Bitcoin ran from about $76K to over $86K, got rejected, and drifted back. It's still up around 6% for the month, so I'm not complaining. Citi just raised its Bitcoin target to $113,000, which is nice to read, though a target is just an opinion with a number on it. Ethereum is hanging around $2,660.

The whales can't agree either

I love watching what the big wallets do. It feels like peeking into the cockpit while the rest of us sit in economy.

This week the cockpit was arguing. One tracker says Bitcoin whales sold about 30,000 BTC (roughly $2.5 billion) while Ethereum whales bought about 60,000 ETH. Then Santiment says wallets holding 10 to 10,000 BTC added more than 41,000 BTC in ten days.

So some whales are buying and some are selling. Bro, which is it? Somebody decide, so the rest of us can copy you.

The boring answer is that these numbers cover different groups and different time windows. I treat whale data like a mood ring. It shows how the big players feel, not where the price goes next.

Who ran and who stumbled

NEAR was the star. It pushed past $5 and has more than doubled in about a month, mostly because the SEC cleared the paperwork for a Bitwise NEAR ETF.

Solana had a quiet, solid week, with record ETF inflows of about $188 million in a single week. Ondo jumped around 26% in one day after a BlackRock announcement.

On the other side, Hyperliquid slid from about $98 to below $86 after a big token unlock and a Binance listing that came with a warning tag. It's still way up on the year, so I'd call it a bruise. XRP just sits near $1.49, about 59% below its old peak, watching everyone else run past it.

The rules are changing too

In the US, the big crypto market-structure bill, the CLARITY Act, got blocked in the Senate 49 to 50 on September 15. The fights are over ethics rules and stablecoin yields. A second vote is technically possible, but the odds for this year look slim.

In the UK, things moved the other way. On September 30, the FCA opened applications for crypto firms. Exchanges, custodians, stablecoin issuers and staking services have until the end of February 2027 to apply, and the full rules start on October 25, 2027.

Rules are the boring part nobody tweets about, but they decide who survives. After watching a $350 million hack in one week, I'm a lot friendlier to them than I used to be.

My honest take

This week felt like the market standing at a door, unable to decide whether to walk in. Good news (ETFs, big money, UK licensing) kept running into bad news (higher rates, a stalled bill, a huge hack).

I won't tell you what to buy or sell. I'm still working out my own plan. What I can say is that the upside here is real, and so are the holes. Respect both.

See you next week, probably still refreshing the same charts.