Stormrake - Insights #Artis

What Happens When the Middleman Goes Down

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 10:54:10 +1000

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If you tried to tap your card at Woolworths, Coles or anywhere else on Saturday afternoon and it just wouldn’t go through, you weren’t imagining things and you weren’t alone. Mastercard suffered a widespread outage across Australia over the weekend, and more than 2,000 people reported the issue at its peak. Commonwealth Bank and NAB both confirmed their customers were affected, and Commonwealth Bank went as far as telling shoppers to stop using tap and go altogether and switch to inserting their card and selecting “savings” to get through eftpos instead. Mastercard later said the disruption was caused by a scheduled system update and that services had been restored, but for a few hours on a Saturday, a huge number of everyday transactions simply didn’t work.

Think about how that actually played out for the person standing at the checkout. Card declined, second card declined, and then the very human moment of patting down your pockets for cash you probably don’t carry anymore. As we move further into a cashless society, fewer of us keep a backup plan. When the primary rail goes down, there often isn’t a plan B sitting in your wallet.

Free Marketing, Courtesy of Mastercard

Here’s the part worth sitting with. This is effectively free marketing for Bitcoin. Not because Bitcoin is trying to replace your Saturday shopping trip tomorrow, but because the entire reason Bitcoin exists is written into the opening line of Satoshi Nakamoto’s whitepaper: “A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.” That sentence was written specifically with this kind of failure in mind. A scheduled update at a payments company shouldn’t be able to stop people from spending their own money, and yet on Saturday, it did.

For context, and to keep this factually honest rather than turning it into a slogan, Bitcoin’s network has not had a perfect record either. It has gone down twice in its history, in 2010 and 2013, and both were software bugs that were patched within hours. Since that second incident in 2013, though, the network hasn’t gone down once. That’s close to 14 years of continuous uptime, sitting at somewhere around 99.98% across its entire life. It’s commonly cited, including by people inside the tech industry itself, that this track record now runs ahead of the uptime posted by companies like Amazon, Google and Facebook over comparable periods. So the fairer claim isn’t that Bitcoin has never gone down. It’s that Bitcoin hasn’t needed a company to schedule an update on your behalf, and it has now stayed online longer without interruption than most of the infrastructure we rely on every day, through bull markets, bear markets, exchange collapses and everything in between.

We’re not going to pretend this is a clean win for crypto adoption. Bitcoin still isn’t something you can tap at Woolies, and for the overwhelming majority of merchants around the world, it isn’t a practical alternative to a card in your pocket today. That’s a fair criticism and we’re not going to argue around it.

But moments like Saturday are a lesson worth remembering, not because everyone needs to rush out and change how they pay for groceries, but because it’s a reminder that your ability to spend your own money shouldn’t depend entirely on a third party’s system staying online. It’s a small crack in the reliability of the rails we’ve all agreed to trust without thinking twice. Cracks like this don’t need to happen often to matter. Every outage, every frozen account, every “sorry, our systems are down” moment chips away a little more at the assumption that centralised payment rails are simply infallible. Over time, that frustration is what pushes people to look for alternatives, and a decentralised system built specifically to remove that single point of failure is the obvious place to look.

And here’s where the two threads tie together. The more people who reach that conclusion and act on it, the more demand there is for the asset itself, and that’s a big part of what has driven Bitcoin’s price higher over its history. So the use case and the investment case aren’t separate stories, they’re the same story told from two angles. Owning and controlling your own money is the point. The fact that doing so has also meant your wealth has grown over time is what makes the proposition genuinely hard to ignore.

Stormrake Spotlight: Pax Gold (PAXG) ($4,366)

After spending the majority of the year in the bears’ hands, PAXG has confirmed a bullish structure flip and momentum reclaim. Great signs for the bulls, firmly above key moving averages and up 10% from the low. We now turn our attention to the key zone above, which acted as support for three months earlier in the year and is now resistance ($4,463 to $4,600). Current support sits at the 200 exponential moving average of $4,344.

BTC/USD Key Levels and Price Action:

Bitcoin price action has been extremely boring for the month of August, hovering around the key level of $63.8k, with both bulls and bears making attempts to move away from this level but neither side having much success, each time finding its way back. Currently the bears have the slight upper hand as BTC trades below $63k, but unless there is a decisive move to $60.1k, we can expect the consolidation to continue.

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*All prices are denominated in USD unless stated otherwise*

Written by Alexandar Artis

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No Advice Warning

The information in this newsletter is general only. It should not be taken as constituting professional advice from the author - Stormrake PTY LTD.

Stormrake is not a financial adviser and does not provide financial product advice. You should consider seeking independent legal, financial, taxation or other advice to check how the information relates to your unique circumstances. Stormrake is not liable for any loss caused, whether due to negligence or otherwise arising from the use of, or reliance on, the information provided directly or indirectly, by this newsletter.

Disclaimer

All statements made in this newsletter are made in good faith and we believe they are accurate and reliable. Stormrake does not give any warranty as to the accuracy, reliability or completeness of information that is contained here, except insofar as any liability under statute cannot be excluded. Stormrake, its directors, employees and their representatives do not accept any liability for any error or omission in this newsletter or for any resulting loss or damage suffered by the recipient or any other person. Unless otherwise specified, copyright of information provided in this newsletter is owned by Stormrake. You may not alter or modify this information in any way, including the removal of this copyright notice.

Copyright © 2024 Stormrake Pty Ltd, All rights reserved

Mirror Mirror On the Wall

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 10:26:11 +1000

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We’ve discussed timing of bear markets before, and we remain just a couple of months out from what we estimate to be the end of this one. But what about price? The current cycle low sits at $57,800, a 54% drawdown from the October all-time high near $126,000. We’re sure many of you who were around for the previous bear have felt it’s been eerily similar.

The saying goes: history doesn’t repeat, but it often rhymes. That’s exactly what we’re seeing again.

Line this cycle up against 2021-22 and the resemblance is hard to ignore. Same shape, same rough proportions of euphoria and grind, but each time round the mirror is a little less brutal. 2021-22 saw Bitcoin fall from just under $69,000 to $15,500, a 77% peak to trough drawdown. This cycle’s 54% drawdown is shallower again, and shallower still than 2018’s 84% collapse. Each bear market has done less damage than the one before it.

What’s missing this time is the final leg. 2022’s bear market didn’t grind quietly to its low. It fell off a cliff when FTX collapsed in November, ripping another 20-odd percent off the price in days on the back of genuinely catastrophic news. That capitulation event is the piece some are waiting to see repeated before they’ll call a bottom, the “surely we get one more flush to $40-50k” crowd.

Whilst price isn’t at as large a drawdown as it was in 2022, the structure is nearly identical to what it was before the FTX collapse. Whether or not we get a catalyst for that final sharp spill over, it’s safe to say this bear market has echoed the previous one yet again.

We’d push back on the idea that we need that flush to call a low. Bear markets don’t end on a calendar date or a technical level. They end when the market stops falling on bad news. That’s the tell, not a chart pattern. Worth watching closely right now: CLARITY Act uncertainty, choppy macro data, an Extreme Fear reading on sentiment, plenty of ingredients for a scare this week, and price has largely shrugged. ETFs have been net buyers through it. That’s not nothing.

We’re not going to pretend we know whether $57,800 is the low. But the setup rhymes more with exhaustion of selling than with a market waiting for its FTX moment. Those sitting in cash for a sub-$50k print run the real risk of being the ones left on the sidelines when the news stops mattering.

More on this Monday. We’ll dig into exactly what “price stops falling on bad news” looks like in the data, and what it’s told us at past cycle lows.

Stormrake Spotlight: Pax Gold (PAXG) ($4,247)

Yesterday was constructive for PAXG despite closing red on the day. The fact it didn’t undergo a large pullback after the breakout is a strong signal that bulls are looking to build on this move. This is the first step in sustaining the breakout.

BTC/USD Key Levels and Price Action:

Momentum looks to be fading for bulls to build on the break above the key resistance level of $63.8k. We’d expect price to retest that level, and from there it’s anyone’s game.

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*All prices are denominated in USD unless stated otherwise*

Written by Alexandar Artis

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The information in this newsletter is general only. It should not be taken as constituting professional advice from the author - Stormrake PTY LTD.

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Two Roads for Crypto Regulation: Moscow Legislates, Washington Waits

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 11:14:53 +1000

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Vladimir Putin signed Russia’s “On Digital Currency and Digital Rights” law yesterday, creating the country’s first fully regulated cryptocurrency market. From September 1, licensed exchanges, brokers, custodians and depositories, all supervised by the Bank of Russia, will let both retail and qualified investors trade approved crypto assets, with retail buyers capped at roughly $3,800 per year per intermediary after passing a competency test. Crypto is classified as an investment asset, not currency; domestic payments in crypto remain banned. Firms have until July 2027 to bring existing operations into compliance.

The framing matters as much as the mechanics. This is not deregulation for its own sake, it’s state capture of a market Russians were already using at scale. In the fortnight after the 2022 invasion, peer to peer ruble to Bitcoin trades tripled as the currency cratered under sanctions. That was never a blip: Chainalysis puts Russia’s crypto inflows at $379 billion between July 2024 and June 2025, up 48% year on year, overtaking the UK as Europe’s largest crypto market. Russia had already carved out an experimental regime for crypto in cross border trade back in 2024. This new law formalises and expands that channel into permanent market structure, the exact route Western sanctions have spent years trying to close.

Iran has followed a similar playbook. Following years of US sanctions, Tehran began accepting Bitcoin and other digital assets for safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz via a state run maritime insurance scheme called Hormuz Safe. Different execution to Russia, same underlying logic: crypto as the workaround once conventional banking access is cut off.

The contrast with Washington is stark. The Digital Asset Market Clarity Act, the most advanced US market structure bill in history, cleared the House in July 2025 and the Senate Banking Committee in May, will not get a Senate floor vote before the August 7 recess. Majority Leader Thune has confirmed there isn’t time left for debate, amendments and cloture before the chamber breaks. Polymarket odds on 2026 passage have collapsed from 82% in February to roughly 28% today; Kalshi’s “before Dec 1” market has fallen sharply over the past fortnight too, from around 60% in late July down to 17% as of this morning. Miss the window and the bill waits until at least September, with Senator Lummis warning a slip this year could push comprehensive US legislation out as far as 2030 once midterm cycle gridlock sets in.

Two sanctioned economies have moved faster on crypto policy than the country whose currency crypto still largely prices against. That irony is real, but it doesn’t change the setup in front of us. Bitcoin is trading around $65,000, roughly 50% below its October 2025 all time high of $126,000. Every 40 to 50% correction in Bitcoin’s history since 2014 has been followed by a new all time high, and this drawdown is already shallower than the 73 to 84% washouts of prior cycles, a sign of a maturing, more institutionally anchored market rather than a broken one.

Clarity delays don’t remove the long term case, they just push the window out. Sovereign demand isn’t waiting on Washington. Russia and Iran are proof that states will find their own rails with or without US legislation, and that same institutional and sovereign appetite is still queued up behind Clarity, ready to move the moment it lands. Drawdowns like this one, deep enough to shake out weak hands but shallow enough to reflect real structural maturity, have historically been the best entry points in Bitcoin’s history. They do not last. The dominoes are lining up. Whether you’re positioned before they fall is the only question that matters from here.

Stormrake Spotlight: Pax Gold (PAXG) ($4,266)

The move we have finally been waiting for, and the bulls are the ones smiling. PAXG up 5% yesterday and finally breaking the month long consolidation. All we need to see is this move sustain itself and it will be safe to say the bulls are back in control of the momentum. Price needs to create a new high above $4,374 to get the structure in their favour too.

BTC/USD Key Levels and Price Action:

The bulls are looking to take advantage of the momentum and the bounce from the retest of the key support level at $63.8k. We have our eye on $65k as the very near term price level, as if BTC breaks this then the bulls will firmly be in control.

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*All prices are denominated in USD unless stated otherwise*

Written by Alexandar Artis

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The information in this newsletter is general only. It should not be taken as constituting professional advice from the author - Stormrake PTY LTD.

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Leverage Doesn't Care How Smart You Are

Wed, 05 Aug 2026 10:41:05 +1000

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If you have been within the investment space or finance over the last few days to weeks, you may be familiar with the name Leopold Aschenbrenner. A 24 year old former OpenAI researcher took the investment world by storm after writing a 165 page essay titled “SITUATIONAL AWARENESS: The Decade Ahead,” and named his hedge fund after it. Since launching in July 2024, the fund posted gains of over 1,000%, at one point managing as much as $45 billion in assets. Then, within the space of a few weeks, it was worth $10 billion.

The assets that took him to the top were the same assets that took him down. Aschenbrenner’s fund was concentrated in AI infrastructure names, chip makers and data centre plays like SK Hynix, CoreWeave, Nebius Group, Sandisk and Micron. When the AI trade was running, those positions were printing. But the fund had also layered in leverage of up to 400% on these positions, meaning every dollar of capital was controlling four dollars of exposure. When the AI rally stalled and volatility returned, the same leverage that turbocharged the gains turbocharged the losses. Bearish bets on software names like Adobe went the wrong way at the same time, compounding the damage. It was safe to say he was early to the AI rally. But being early and being right on direction means nothing if the structure underneath you cannot survive a drawdown.

As the saying goes: when the tide goes out, it exposes who has been swimming naked.

It is also worth noting Aschenbrenner’s background before he ever ran a fund. Before Situational Awareness, he worked with Sam Bankman-Fried at FTX, helping run the FTX Future Fund, a charity operated out of a Bahamas penthouse. FTX, of course, was one of the largest leverage and risk management blowups of the previous bear market.

We have seen this story before, and not just in AI stocks. Think back to October 2025, when the crypto market saw close to $20 billion USD of leveraged positions wiped out in a single day. At the time, it was treated as the most violent deleveraging events in the asset class’s history, a headline that dominated crypto media for weeks. Compare that to Aschenbrenner’s fund alone shedding roughly $35 billion, more than the entire crypto market’s worst day, in a matter of days, and it barely registered outside of financial media as a footnote to the broader AI stock correction. The pattern is identical: capital piles into a winning thesis, leverage gets added to amplify the returns, and the position becomes a forced seller the moment the market turns. The difference is scale. What was a seismic, market-defining event for crypto was, for traditional finance, a single fund’s bad month. That gap is the point. Crypto is still a fraction of the size of the market it is set to disrupt, and there is a long runway of growth still ahead of it.

It shows you that even those considered to be at the top of the game eventually lose to leverage. It is a tale as old as time, and one we have seen again and again, from Long-Term Capital Management to Archegos to now Situational Awareness.

That is why at Stormrake we advocate for spot holdings of Bitcoin. Leverage is a major danger and does not help preserve wealth. If anything, it adds danger to the very thing you are trying to protect.

Stormrake Spotlight: Pax Gold (PAXG) ($4,069)

PAXG had another flat day and still remains within the consolidation range. Nothing to report until the range is broken.

BTC/USD Key Levels and Price Action:

Bitcoin broke above the key resistance level at $63.8k after a few attempts over the last couple of days but now looks to be ready to retest after stalling out at $64.5k. If this level can now be flipping into support and the bulls succeed in sustaining this move then we could look to higher prices and $66.8k once again…

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*All prices are denominated in USD unless stated otherwise*

Written by Alexandar Artis

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The information in this newsletter is general only. It should not be taken as constituting professional advice from the author - Stormrake PTY LTD.

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The ISM Keeps Firing. Bitcoin Buyers Should Be Paying Attention

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 10:59:12 +1000

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Back in February we flagged the ISM Manufacturing PMI’s breakout above 50 as one of the more reliable macro tells for Bitcoin. Five months on, the signal hasn’t just held, it’s strengthened. Yesterday’s print gives us reason to revisit it.

A quick refresher: what is the ISM?

The ISM Manufacturing PMI is a monthly survey of US purchasing and supply executives, covering new orders, production, employment, inventories and supplier deliveries. A reading above 50 signals expansion in the manufacturing sector; below 50 signals contraction. It’s one of the oldest and most closely tracked leading indicators in US markets, and as we noted back in February, historical analysis shows Bitcoin has displayed its strongest correlation with the ISM out of all macro data releases, ahead of inflation prints and every other release we track.

Where we are now?

July’s print came in at 55.6%, well above the 54.0% consensus and the highest level in four years. That alone would be a solid headline. The more important detail sits underneath it.

The PMI hasn’t just poked above 50, it has now held above 52 for seven consecutive months:

January: 52.6
February: 52.4
March: 52.7
April: 52.7
May: 54.0
June: 53.3
July: 55.6

Before January, the index had spent roughly 40 months below 51. US manufacturing was in contraction for the better part of two years. That drought is now firmly behind us, and the pace of expansion is accelerating rather than flattening out.

Why does the 52 threshold matter more than the standard 50 line? Because holding above it for a sustained run has only happened twice before in recent history, in January 2017 and September 2020, and both instances were followed by extended, multi-month rallies across stocks and crypto. In the 2017 case, the index went on to climb above 60, its highest level since 2004.

It’s also not a US-only story. Japan’s manufacturing PMI printed 54.5 on the same day, also its seventh straight month of expansion and the fastest pace of output growth since 2014. Two of the world’s largest manufacturing economies are now expanding at the same time.

Why this matters for Bitcoin

The mechanism is fairly intuitive once you follow the chain through. When factories see more orders, that revenue doesn’t stay with the large manufacturers, it moves through the whole supply chain: suppliers, parts makers, logistics firms, and the small businesses around them. Payrolls rise, margins improve, and a portion of that extra cash doesn’t sit idle. Some goes back into hiring and expansion. Some finds its way into markets. That’s the basic reason sustained manufacturing expansion has tended to lead risk assets rather than follow them.

This is also the piece that lines up with the timing we’ve been consistent on. That “extra cash” doesn’t show up in markets the same month the PMI print crosses the line, it takes time to move through payrolls, margins and eventually into capital markets. Given expansion has now been running since January and is still building momentum, that lag points toward the flow-through landing later this year rather than earlier. That’s consistent with the case we’ve made for a while: the bear market being complete by the back half of 2026, with this kind of macro backdrop providing the fuel once it arrives rather than acting as an instant switch.

The bottom line

None of this is a call for an immediate move higher. Bitcoin is still trading well off its October 2025 high, and ISM strength alone won’t override near-term positioning or liquidity conditions specific to crypto markets. But as a macro backdrop, seven straight months above 52, accelerating rather than fading, with only two precedents in recent history and both preceding sustained rallies, is about as constructive as this signal has looked in years. It continues to build the case we’ve been making since February: expansion now, cash later, and a bear market that’s complete by the timing this lag points to rather than against it.

We’ll keep tracking this one closely as the September print approaches.

Stormrake Spotlight: Pax Gold (PAXG) ($4,052)

A quiet day for PAXG. It lost just 0.50% over the last 24 hours as it continues to sit within the consolidation range between the 21 exponential moving average and the key support zone.

BTC/USD Key Levels and Price Action:

The key level of $63.8k is acting like a magnet for Bitcoin price action. We saw the bears attempt to send BTC lower, with a low of $62.3k printed before price shot back up to the key resistance level.

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*All prices are denominated in USD unless stated otherwise*

Written by Alexandar Artis

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The information in this newsletter is general only. It should not be taken as constituting professional advice from the author - Stormrake PTY LTD.

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Safe Custody> Self Custody

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 12:02:37 +1000

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Saturday’s PSA on the Coldcard breach was a reminder of a principle at the core of how we think about custody at Stormrake.

Bitcoin gave everyone the option to hold their own keys and remove counterparty risk entirely. That’s real and it matters. We’re advocates for self-custody as a principle. But holding that right doesn’t mean everyone is equipped to exercise it safely.

“Not your keys, not your coins” is one of the most repeated lines in this industry, and there’s truth in it. But it’s also become a piece of toxic ideology, repeated as gospel to people who aren’t ready to self-custody. This weekend showed exactly why. People adopt the mantra because it sounds principled, not because they’ve done the work to back it up. That gap between conviction and competence is exactly what gets exploited, and when it is, the coins simply move to someone else’s wallet.

Self-custody demands real operational discipline: generating your own entropy properly, understanding how to transact and move Bitcoin without relying on another party, secure seed storage, firmware hygiene, and constant vigilance against an evolving attack surface.

Coldcard isn’t the first wallet to face scrutiny over this, and it won’t be the last. Trust Wallet has faced its own entropy-related vulnerabilities in the past, the same category of flaw that hit Coldcard this weekend. Different vendors, different timelines, same underlying lesson: even trusted wallets carry risk that sits outside the user’s control, and often outside their visibility entirely.

So ask the question directly. The case for self-custody rests on sovereignty, on removing trust in third parties. But sovereignty only has value if the coins are still there. If your stack is drained by a firmware flaw you never knew existed, the principle didn’t protect you, it cost you. Self-custody doesn’t remove risk, it transfers it onto the user and onto every piece of hardware in that chain. For most people, that’s a risk they can’t see, in exchange for a slogan that offers no protection once the coins are gone.

Safe custody doesn’t ask anyone to give up on sovereignty as an idea. It asks a more practical question: is the ideological win worth the position size? For most holders, the honest answer is no.

If you have any doubt at all about whether your storage has been exposed, don’t take the risk. Contact your Stormrake Broker today.

Stormrake’s Custody offer for August is live for new deposits into custody. Get in touch with your broker to learn more.

Stormrake Spotlight: Pax Gold (PAXG) ($4,067)

PAXG looks to resume the month long consolidation between the key support level and the 21 exponential moving average. It has lacked any volatility to break in either direction, but once the volatility does come, the move will be decisive. The downside zone is visible on the chart, whilst the resistance is $4,064, which needs a sustained break above to shift the structure.

BTC/USD Key Levels and Price Action:

Bitcoin spent the weekend consolidating just under the key resistance level of $63.8k. Whilst momentum leans slightly bearish, this week is up for grabs. A slow weekend of price action means the first sign of volatility will be decisive. The bears are targeting $60k, whilst the bulls look to break the moving averages and key resistance level at the price mentioned above.

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*All prices are denominated in USD unless stated otherwise*

Written by Alexandar Artis

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The information in this newsletter is general only. It should not be taken as constituting professional advice from the author - Stormrake PTY LTD.

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EMERGENCY PSA: Coldcard Firmware Flaw Has Drained $38M: Here's What To Do

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 11:56:41 +1000

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A critical firmware vulnerability in Coldcard hardware wallets has come to light, and it is serious. Roughly 594 BTC, worth around $38 million, was swept from approximately 500 single-signature wallets in a 25 minute window on 30 July. The root cause was a firmware error dating back to March 2021 that caused affected devices to bypass proper hardware randomness during key generation, leaving predictable, crackable seeds.

We know a meaningful number of our clients hold Coldcard devices for self-custody. This is not a minor bug. If your seed was generated on a vulnerable firmware version without additional entropy, your keys may already be compromised, even if your coins have not moved yet.

Who is at risk?

Mk3 devices running firmware 4.0.1 or later are the worst affected. Mk4, Q and Mk5 devices were subject to a separate, less severe flaw. Coinkite has released fixed firmware (Mk4 and Mk5 to version 5.6.0 or later, Q to version 1.5.0Q or later), but a firmware update does not retroactively fix a seed that was already generated insecurely. Coinkite has indicated that a meaningful amount of additional entropy, at least 50 dice rolls, is needed to be confident your seed sits outside the vulnerable range. If you did not add that level of entropy or a passphrase when you set up your device, you should treat your existing seed as potentially exposed.

Be on High Alert for Scams

No legitimate party will ever ask for your seed phrase. Not a manufacturer, not a custody provider, not us. A request for your seed words is by itself proof that the request is fraudulent, however it is branded. Do not enter your seed phrase into any website offering to check whether you are affected. That is a scam.

Events like this always attract opportunists within hours. Treat any unsolicited message, tool or “checker” site asking for your seed as hostile by default.

What this means practically

This is not a Bitcoin problem. It is a self-custody execution problem, and it is exactly the kind of tail risk that sits quietly under the surface of “not your keys, not your coins” until it does not. Firmware, chip design and randomness generation are layers most holders never interact with directly, and this event is a reminder of how much trust that requires.

This is not the first breach of a self-custody solution, and it will not be the last. Stormrake custody takes that risk off the table.

Stormrake’s Custody Solution

Whether you are running an affected device or simply want somewhere safe to move your coins while you figure out your next step, Stormrake’s custody solution is a top tier way to store your Bitcoin. It takes the whole question of seed generation, firmware risk and device security off your plate, no drawer, no single point of failure, no guessing whether your setup was done right.

If you want to talk through moving your holdings across, reach out to the team directly. We are moving through client queries on this today.

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*All prices are denominated in USD unless stated otherwise*

Written by Alexandar Artis

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The information in this newsletter is general only. It should not be taken as constituting professional advice from the author - Stormrake PTY LTD.

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Rake Review: July 2026

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 19:12:01 +1000

Clarity, Confirmation, and the Cycle Low

If July has had a defining narrative, it is this one. The CLARITY Act, the bill designed to finally draw a clear line between which digital assets fall under the SEC and which fall under the CFTC, has been the single biggest story sitting underneath this month's price action, even as the headline number stayed relatively calm.

The Journey for Clarity

What the Clarity Act Actually Does

At its core, the bill splits crypto assets into two regulatory lanes. Assets that behave more like decentralised commodities, Bitcoin being the clearest example, would fall under the CFTC. Assets that behave more like traditional investment contracts would stay with the SEC. If you want the full breakdown of what those two regulators actually do and why crypto has never fit neatly into either box, that is this month's Education topic below. For now, the market-relevant point is simpler: a market that finally knows its own rules tends to attract the kind of institutional money that has been sitting on the sidelines for years, not because it did not want in, but because compliance teams could not sign off on something with no clear rulebook.

Where the Odds Actually Sit

The bill passed the House comfortably back in July 2025 and cleared the Senate Banking Committee in mid-May this year, and has been sitting on the Senate's calendar since. Two separate prediction market questions are worth tracking here, because they are answering different things.

The first asks a narrower, procedural question: will the Senate actually hold a recorded vote before Congress leaves for its August recess. That number has been on a wild ride through July. It was above 80% on 20 July, spiked toward 72% mid-month on news that the White House had agreed on ethics language, and has since fallen back to around 40% as Senate Majority Leader John Thune has publicly said he does not expect the bill to be done in time. That is a fast, sentiment-driven number, and it moves on headlines almost daily.

The second, broader question is whether crypto market structure legislation actually becomes law this year at all, which is a higher bar than simply getting a vote. That contract is currently pricing somewhere in the high 30s to low 40s percent for 2026 enactment, down materially from the 80%-plus odds seen back in February. If 2026 does not happen, the same markets show meaningfully better odds further out, in the region of 50 to 60% for enactment sometime before mid to late 2027.

What This Actually Means

Put simply: the market is currently pricing this as a coin flip on getting done this year, and a reasonably good bet on getting done eventually. That is a very different setup to a bill that is definitely happening or definitely dead, and it explains why price action around Clarity headlines has been sharp but short-lived rather than sustained, the market genuinely does not know yet, and neither does anyone else. Worth watching the procedural vote closely over the next fortnight, since a miss there effectively pushes the realistic timeline for this catalyst into next year.

A Familiar Shape: The Late 2023 ETF Rally

The setup has an echo worth drawing out. Through the second half of 2023, Bitcoin ran hard on the back of anticipation for a spot ETF approval that had not yet happened. The market was not reacting to the event itself, it was reacting to the increasing probability of the event, pricing in the outcome well before Washington delivered it.

The timing difference between the two setups is the part worth sitting with. The 2022 cycle low was set in November of that year, and the ETF approval did not land until January 2024, close to fourteen months later. The rally on approval expectations built steadily through most of that gap. Where we sit today is a different point in the cycle entirely. We are still inside the bear market, likely in the process of forming this cycle's low rather than well clear of it, which means a Clarity Act driven rally, if the bill does pass, would be arriving far earlier relative to the bottom than the ETF rally did. That is not a reason to write off the narrative. It is a reason to treat it as one leg of the recovery story rather than the whole of it, with the more traditional macro and cycle drivers still needing to do the rest of the work behind it.

The Bullish Case, and Its Limits

The optimistic read is straightforward: regulatory clarity tends to unlock capital that compliance and legal risk had previously kept out, particularly from institutions that have been openly waiting for exactly this kind of framework before committing meaningfully. A passed Clarity Act would be a structural tailwind, not a one-off headline, the kind of catalyst that changes the addressable pool of capital rather than just sentiment for a news cycle.

The honest counterweight is that the bill is not law yet, current odds put this year's passage closer to a coin flip than a certainty, and a market that has partly priced in passage carries real disappointment risk if the vote slips into next year. Worth watching alongside price, not worth trading purely on hope.

The mechanics of why this split even needs legislating, and what the SEC and CFTC actually do differently, are worth understanding properly rather than taking on faith. That is what this month's Education section digs into.

Forming a bottom

We are entering the stage of the cycle where the conversation has to shift from "are we still falling" to "have we already found the floor." Every prior Bitcoin cycle has followed a remarkably consistent rhythm from peak to trough, and on that rhythm alone, we are now deep into the window where cycle lows have historically formed.

Timing: Where We Sit Against History

Bitcoin's all time high of $126,272 was set in October 2025. That puts us roughly nine months on from the peak as of this review. Stack that against the last three major cycle troughs:

2021 to 2022: twelve months from the November 2021 all time high to the November 2022 cycle low
2017 to 2018: twelve months from the December 2017 all time high to the December 2018 cycle low
2013 to 2015: around thirteen months from the November 2013 all time high to the January 2015 cycle low

Nine months in, we are not yet at the outer edge of that historical window, but we are firmly inside it. If this cycle rhymes with the last three, the low is either recently behind us or still just a few months away.

It is also worth noting what those three windows have in common beyond their length. In each case, the trough was not obvious as it happened. The 2022 low coincided with the FTX collapse, the 2018 low ground out through a dead, directionless December, and the January 2015 low arrived with almost no fanfare at all, just a slow bleed that eventually stopped. None of them announced themselves. They were only identifiable in hindsight, usually weeks or months after the fact, which is exactly why waiting for confirmation is structurally expensive: by the time the bottom is obvious, a meaningful chunk of the recovery has typically already happened.

Our own confirmed cycle low so far this quarter sits at $57,800. Whether that print holds as the definitive low for this cycle is not something we can call with certainty yet. What we can say is that its timing, roughly eight to nine months off the October all-time high, sits comfortably inside the historical range rather than ahead of or behind it. That is the entire point of raising it now rather than after the fact. History does not repeat on a fixed clock, but it has never missed this window by much either.

The Cost of Waiting for Confirmation

Nobody can promise the exact day the bottom is printed. What can be shown clearly is the mathematics of what waiting for that certainty actually costs.

Using $200,000 as the target for the next bull run, the multiple on offer shrinks fast the longer confirmation is awaited:

The pattern is the point, not the precision of any single number. Every $10,000 of price recovery that happens before conviction sets in is a meaningful bite out of the eventual multiple, and that erosion is not linear, it is steepest right where we sit today. The jump from $65,000 to $75,000 alone costs close to half a turn of multiple. Wait for the price to climb another $10,000 past that as proof the bottom is in, and the round trip to $200,000 has already shrunk from roughly triple your money to barely two and a half times it, before a single dollar of new conviction has actually been earned.

This cuts both ways, and it is worth being upfront about the other side of the trade. Entering early into what still could be a further leg down carries its own risk, and a level like $57,800 acting as the low is not guaranteed. That is precisely why this is a question of risk and reward rather than a call to catch an exact bottom. Scaling in through this zone, rather than waiting for a single all-clear signal, is one way of participating in the asymmetry without needing to be right about the exact week the low prints. The broader point stands regardless of the entry method: certainty and price move in opposite directions, and the wait for one is a direct cost against the other.

July's Bitcoin Performance Leads Into August's No Man's Land

The aforementioned narrative of the Clarity Act dominated the month and saw Bitcoin put in its first green month since April, very much needed to stem the bleeding of the current bear market.

But a late bearish narrative has seemingly put a halt on the momentum, as a Bloomberg headline hit timelines flagging a chance of a late month interest rate hike.

The month started with a new cycle low at $57,800, but from that moment July turned it around and began to climb, starting conversations of the bottom potentially being in or very close, which we have addressed above.

Whilst the month is green, it doesn't necessarily mean the end of the bear market. The green price action needs to continue into August and push on higher to create a higher high, which hasn't been achieved since the all time high in October.

Now let's dive into the current structure and what we can expect, but also look at what Bitcoin needs to achieve in August.

Unfortunately for August, it is one of two bearish months on average for Bitcoin (the other being September). August has an average return of -0.64% and has delivered 10 red months of the last 15 Augusts.

Source:https://www.tradingview.com/x/SHtiszJT/

There are two clear levels to watch for August. On the downside, the current cycle low of $57,800 sits 10% away from current price. The immediate upside level to watch is $67,000, currently ~5% away from current price, which was July's high and the most recent lower high.

Momentum leans slightly bearish, but can be considered 51/49 in favour of the downside, having been quite flat throughout July. In other words, Bitcoin is in no man's land, up for the taking by either side.

In the News

BitMart and BitMEX Both Announce Shutdowns

Two established names in crypto are closing their doors within days of each other. BitMEX, one of the oldest exchanges in the industry and the first to offer derivative trading in crypto, announced it will wind down by 23 September, ending an eleven year run in which it effectively invented the perpetual futures contract, the leveraged product that became the backbone of nearly every exchange's derivatives business. BitMart followed three days later, halting new registrations and deposits from 26 July with a full closure targeted for 26 August, making it the third notable exchange closure this month after AscendEX. Neither closure has been linked to insolvency, a hack, or regulatory enforcement, and the more likely explanation is structural: the mid-tier exchange model has been running on thinning volume for some time, and a prolonged bear market tends to be exactly when that gap finally becomes unsustainable, a cleanout of weaker infrastructure rather than a fresh warning sign. Worth remembering regardless, exchange risk does not announce itself in advance, and eleven years of history was no guarantee against BitMEX's eventual wind-down.

The Headline Fakeout: Rate Decision

As we now know, the potential rate hike headlines hurt bullish momentum, and when the decision came, rates remained unchanged, with Warsh delivering a hawkish message that reinforced the central bank's focus on fighting persistent inflation. Warsh emphasised that the Fed has no soft inflation target and remains resolute in restoring price stability to 2%, making it clear that interest rate cuts are off the table for now and keeping the door open for potential future rate hikes if price pressures remain elevated. Highlighted by three dissents on the committee favouring an immediate 25 basis point hike, the meeting signalled that monetary policy will stay tighter for longer, dampening expectations for near term easing.

SpaceX Comes Back Down to Earth

Last month the largest IPO in history launched. Not only did it dominate headlines, it also extracted liquidity from every other market as investors tried to pile into the most hyped launch ever. SpaceX opened at $135 and within a few days reached a high of $225. Fast forward to the end of July, it is now trading at $112, 50% lost in less than two months. It goes to show how quickly price action can unwind once the hype fades.

Market Update

Here is the fast five of what you need to know about the market in July 2026:

Bitcoin increased by 9%
Ethereum increased by 21%
XRP increased by 3.43%
Hyperliquid fell by 17.2%
The total crypto market cap increased by 7.50%

Video of the month

Sovereignty Brief Ep 6: Navigating Common Investor Mistakes with Brody Chatfield

Bisher Khudeira and Brody Chatfield

Education: SEC vs CFTC, Explained Simply

Every month the Clarity Act story keeps coming back to the same two letters: SEC and CFTC. This Rake Review has covered what the bill means for markets, but it is worth actually unpacking what these two regulators are and why the distinction between them exists in the first place.

Two Regulators, Two Very Different Jobs

The Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC, was built to oversee securities. In plain terms, a security is typically something you buy expecting profit from someone else's effort, a share in a company, a bond, an investment contract. The SEC's job is investor protection: making sure companies disclose accurate information and that promoters cannot mislead the people buying in.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the CFTC, oversees commodities and their derivatives instead. Commodities are raw, interchangeable goods, things like gold, oil, or wheat, where the value comes from the asset itself rather than from a company or a team working behind it. The CFTC's traditional focus has been on futures and derivatives markets built around those commodities, rather than on the underlying asset itself.

Why Crypto Fell Into a Grey Area

Bitcoin does not fit neatly into either box on paper, and law written decades before crypto existed was never going to answer the question cleanly. Is a decentralised network with no company behind it and no promoter making promises about future profit a security, or is it closer to a commodity like gold, valuable simply because it is scarce and useful? Regulators, courts, and the industry itself have disagreed on this for years, and in the absence of a clear answer, enforcement has often ended up deciding the question after the fact, asset by asset, case by case, through lawsuits rather than legislation.

That is the practical cost of the grey area. Exchanges have had to guess which assets might later be deemed securities and pulled listings defensively. Institutions with compliance obligations have stayed out entirely rather than take on legal risk with no clear rulebook. Everyday users have had a harder time understanding what protections, if any, actually apply to what they hold.

What the Clarity Act Is Trying to Fix

The Clarity Act's core job is to draw that line properly into law rather than leaving it to be argued out case by case. Assets that behave like decentralised commodities, without a company or promoter controlling them, would sit under the CFTC. Assets that behave more like traditional investment contracts would stay with the SEC. Nothing about the underlying assets changes, what changes is that everyone, exchanges, institutions, and everyday holders alike, would finally know which rulebook applies before acting rather than finding out after an enforcement action.

That is the entire reason this bill matters as much as it does to market sentiment, it is not really a story about any single asset, it is a story about removing the guesswork that has quietly shaped which capital has been willing to enter the market at all.

Written by Alexandar Artis

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Q3 2026 Outlook Breakdown – Part 5: Key Execution Levels

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 11:34:36 +1000

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Over this series we’ve built the case from several different angles: the historical drawdown data in Part 1, the Wyckoff mirror in Part 2, the equities-versus-Bitcoin rotation setup in Part 3, and the lower-highs structure mirroring 2022 in Part 4. Today we bring it all together into the levels that actually matter for how this plays out from here.

The Full Framework

Our Q3 Outlook maps out four specific levels, each with its own historical signal and what it would mean if reached.

This sequence, a lower high, a consolidation, another lower high, another lower low, then a breakdown, isn’t unique to this cycle. It’s a structure that has shown up before at the tail end of a bear market, immediately before the final capitulation.

The Downside Zone to Watch

The $55,000 to $50,000 range is our primary Q3 downside objective, the level our framework points to as the highest-quality entry zone if the drawdown, Wyckoff, and 2022 mirror patterns from earlier in this series continue to play out the way history suggests. Below that sits $48,000, the maximum liquidity pool and one of the more significant accumulation opportunities this cycle has offered.

Bitcoin is currently trading around $64,000, having confirmed a new cycle low of $57,800 earlier in this series. That puts price above the Fight Zone for now, but $60,000 remains the level to watch as the current battleground. A sustained hold above it keeps the path toward reclaiming higher ground open, while a failure to defend it on any pullback opens the door to the deeper levels below.

The Level That Changes Everything

On the other side of this framework sits a single level that would change the entire picture: a weekly close above $83,000. That would invalidate the bear market thesis outlined across this series entirely.

This is worth being precise about, because it’s the kind of level that’s easy to gloss over in the excitement of a rally. A single day above $83,000, or an intraday wick through it, doesn’t count. It takes a weekly close above that level to shift the framework from “still inside the bear market structure” to “thesis invalidated.”

Why the Whole Framework Matters, Not Just One Level

Having a downside target without an invalidation level is just a guess dressed up as a forecast. Having the full ladder from $83,000 down to $48,000 is what makes this an actual framework rather than a hope. Each level tells you something different: $83,000 is where the thesis breaks, $60,000 is the battleground we’re inside right now, $55,000 to $50,000 is the primary objective and highest-quality entry zone, and $48,000 is the maximum liquidity pool if the washout runs deeper still.

That combination lets you approach the rest of this quarter with a plan rather than a reaction. If price grinds lower through these levels in order, that’s consistent with everything we’ve laid out across this series and reinforces the accumulation case from Part 1. If price instead closes a week above $83,000, that’s a clear signal to step back and reassess the thesis, not something to explain away.

Bringing the Series Together

Across five notes, we’ve made the case that Bitcoin’s current drawdown sits inside a historically rare accumulation window, that the chart structure both at the top and the bottom mirrors patterns seen before, that a rare valuation gap against traditional equities adds a macro tailwind, and that the specific shape of this decline closely resembles the final stage of the 2022 cycle before its own bottom.

None of this is a guarantee. Markets don’t owe anyone a repeat of history. But when several independent angles, price history, chart structure, cross-asset valuations, and cycle comparisons, all point in the same direction, that’s about as strong a case as this kind of analysis can build. The levels above are where that case gets tested in the coming months.

For the full breakdown behind this framework, read our complete Q3 2026 Outlook report here .

Stormrake Spotlight: Pax Gold (PAXG) ($4,067)

PAXG continues to battle the 21 exponential moving average. This consolidation remains tight between the moving average and the key support zone, and it’s only a matter of time before one gives way.

BTC/USD Key Levels and Price Action:

A single hour saw Bitcoin lose over 1.5%, sending it back down to the key support level of $63.8k. This move has flipped momentum and structure back to the bears. We saw the rejection at the overhead resistance of $66.8k, followed by a lower high, and now the move back to the support level.

If the bears successfully break through this support level, we could see an attempt to create new cycle lows.

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*All prices are denominated in USD unless stated otherwise*

Written by Alexandar Artis

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The information in this newsletter is general only. It should not be taken as constituting professional advice from the author - Stormrake PTY LTD.

Disclaimer

Q3 2026 Outlook Breakdown – Part 4: What History Says About the Final Leg

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 10:41:59 +1000

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So far in this series we’ve built the case from Bitcoin’s own drawdown data, the Wyckoff mirror at the top and bottom, and a rotation setup against traditional markets. Today we zoom into the price action itself, and look at a structure that has shown up before the end of a previous cycle too.

Two Lower Highs and a New Cycle Low

The chart below maps Bitcoin’s price action from the 2025 peak. After the all-time high, Bitcoin printed a lower high, then fell into a bear flag, a descending consolidation pattern that typically resolves in the direction of the prior trend. Inside that flag, price carved out a further lower high and a lower low, before eventually breaking down to a new cycle low.

The 2022 Mirror

The chart below shows the 2022 bear market, and the structure is close to identical to what we’re seeing now. After the all-time high, Bitcoin printed a lower high, then another lower high, before breaking down hard into a bear flag of its own, complete with its own lower high and lower low inside the flag.

What followed that bear flag is the part worth paying attention to. Price didn’t reverse the moment the flag broke down. It moved into an extended, choppy range that this chart marks as the Final Washout, a drawn-out period of lower prices that eventually gave way to the FTX collapse and the eventual cycle low, before the real recovery began.

That same sequence, all time high, lower high, lower high, bear flag, then a final washout phase before the bottom, is exactly the structure we mapped on the current cycle’s chart in the previous section. The two charts aren’t just similar. They’re close to identical in shape.

Why the Pattern Matters More Than Any Single Level

The value of recognising this structure isn’t in pinpointing an exact price. It’s in recognising the shape of price action that has, before, appeared right before a cycle’s final move rather than in the middle of an extended decline. A market carving out repeated lower highs and lower lows within a narrowing range is a market running out of sellers willing to hold at successively lower prices, not one with fresh conviction to break down further indefinitely.

We’re not treating this as confirmation that the bottom is in. We’re treating it as another data point, alongside the drawdown framework from Part 1 and the Wyckoff mirror from Part 2, that lines up with the idea that we are in the closing stages of this move rather than its early ones.

For the full breakdown behind this framework, read our complete Q3 2026 Outlook report here.

Stormrake Spotlight: Pax Gold (PAXG) ($4,122)

PAXG has increased by 1.2% and finally gotten back above the 21 exponential moving average. We mentioned that PAXG was at make or break, either getting above the overhead resistance or breaking below the key support. It seems the bulls are attempting the former, but this isn’t the first time we’ve seen a break of the 21ema. For this move to have substance, it needs to continue higher and stay above it, otherwise the bears will maintain momentum.

BTC/USD Key Levels and Price Action:

Bitcoin reached the key resistance level of $66.8k and has pulled back over the last 24 hours. Despite the pullback, the bulls remain in control of momentum and structure, and we can expect another retest of this key resistance over the next day or so.

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*All prices are denominated in USD unless stated otherwise*

Written by Alexandar Artis

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No Advice Warning

The information in this newsletter is general only. It should not be taken as constituting professional advice from the author - Stormrake PTY LTD.