• The signal that turned
• What the Q1 snapshot proved
• The institutional parade
• The fight Wall Street didn’t think it would have
• The escape hatch went international
• The macro counterweight (and why it’s actuallybullish)
• The Mark Cuban lesson
• The Canadian angle
• What May actually meant

Bitcoin opened May at $77,437 and closed it at $73,856. On paper,
a losing month. In reality, the most important month of the cycle so
far.

May 2026 was the month the chart confirmed the bear market was
over. It was also the month the world’s largest asset managers,
sovereign wealth funds, and a U.S. state government finished
positioning themselves on Bitcoin’s side of the line, while the
legacy banking system stopped pretending it wasn’t terrified. Two
stories, same month, one inflection point.

Let me break it down.

§The signal that turned

Konrad’s been writing about this for weeks, but May was when it
finally happened. He calls it the Bullish Confirmation Line:
the weekly RSI level around 43-44 that has, historically, called the
end of every Bitcoin bear market.

Here’s the pattern. The weekly RSI has only printed below 30 three
times before in Bitcoin’s history. Each time, that low marked the
bottom. And each time the RSI climbed back above 43, the bear market
lows were never seen again. We hit sub-30 for the fourth time in
February 2026 at a price of $60,600, a 47% drawdown from the $126,000
all-time high set last October.

In May, the RSI crossed back above 43.

That’s the chart talking. Whether you trust technical analysis or
not (I have my reservations too), four-for-four is a pretty great
track record. The implication: $60,600 was the bottom, and unless
something genuinely breaks the pattern, we don’t see those prices
again.

Bitcoin smashed past the $80,600 November floor on May 7th, peaked
at $82,800 the next day, then held above $81K all week. On May 14th
it touched $83K.

The price retreated to $77K, then $73K by month-end as macro
headwinds picked up. But the structural signal was already in.
Pullbacks inside a confirmed uptrend are different animals than
pullbacks inside a bear market. The first kind ends with higher lows.
The second kind ends with you HODLing for dear life as new lows fly
by you.

§What the Q1 snapshot proved

Now, charts are charts. The more durable evidence came from the
data Bitcoin Well published in our Infinite Q1 Snapshot: Bitcoin
dropped 47% from its October ATH, and Bitcoin ETFs reduced their
holdings by 7%.

Read that sentence again.

A 47% price decline. A 7% reduction in ETF holdings. That is not
how the previous cycle’s investor base behaved. In 2022, retail
capitulated at every leg down. The miners dumped to cover operating
costs. The leveraged traders got vaporized. The Bitcoin investor base
of three years ago looked nothing like who’s holding it today.

The current cohort? ETFs, sovereign wealth funds, corporate
treasuries, and increasingly direct state custody. These are buyers
with permanent capital, no quarterly redemption pressure, and time
horizons measured in decades. They don’t panic-sell. They accumulate
through drawdowns.

That’s why the bear markets keep getting shorter and shallower.
It’s not technical magic. It’s a different buyer.

§The institutional parade

May made the institutional case impossible to dismiss:

• BlackRock acquired another $600 million in Bitcoin during the month and filed for tokenized money-market funds that sidestep the CLARITY Act’s stablecoin yield restrictions entirely. The world’s largest asset manager isn’t waiting for Congress.

• JPMorgan disclosed $390 million in Bitcoin exposure after buying the February dip.

• Bank of America put Bitcoin, XRP, Ethereum, and Solana on its 10-K. Under oath. On a regulated filing.

• Charles Schwab ($12 trillion in client assets) launched direct spot Bitcoin and Ethereum trading. Not an ETF wrapper, the actual asset. Your parents’ retirement platform now holds Bitcoin for them.

• Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth funds now hold roughly 13,000 BTC through ETFs (~$882M). Mubadala added 16% to its BlackRock IBIT stake in Q1.

• SpaceX revealed in its IPO filing that it holds 18,712 BTC. The world’s most valuable private company has been a long-term Bitcoin holder all along.

• Block’s Square crossed one million Bitcoin-enabled merchants, all settled over the Lightning Network.

And the most validating moment of all came on the last day of the
month: Texas became the first U.S. state to choose direct
spot Bitcoin custody over an ETF for its reserves. A
five-member Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Advisory Committee. A $700
billion state economy. Not a wrapper. The actual asset, in actual
self-custody.

If you’ve been saying “not your keys, not your coins”
for years and feeling like you were shouting into a hurricane, Texas
just shouted it back. With a state seal on it.

§The fight Wall Street didn’t think it would have

Here’s where it gets interesting from an Austrian perspective.

The CLARITY Act, the most serious attempt yet to write a
regulatory framework for digital assets in the U.S., passed the
Senate Banking Committee on May 15th with a 15-9 bipartisan vote. Two
Democratic crossings (Gallego and Alsobrooks). Galaxy Digital priced
the odds of full passage by August at 75%. Bitcoin rallied past $82K
on the news.

And then Jamie Dimon went to war.

JPMorgan’s CEO publicly called Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong “full
of shit” and vowed to fight CLARITY in the full Senate. The
American Bankers Association, BPI, and Consumer Bankers Association
sent joint letters to Senate leaders. The objection? The bill allows
yield-bearing stablecoins. The banks don’t want competition for
deposits.

Read that carefully. The banks aren’t fighting CLARITY because of
“consumer protection.” They’re fighting it because
yield-bearing stablecoins let non-bank issuers compete for
the deposits that fractional reserve banking depends on. The
banking cartel has held a regulatory monopoly on paying interest for
a century. CLARITY would crack it open.

Important caveat here, because I don’t want to misrepresent
anything: stablecoins are not true sovereignty either. Tether and
Circle can freeze addresses. The T3 Financial Crime Unit (mentioned
earlier in this piece) just demonstrated exactly that by freezing
$450 million across 23 countries. A yield-bearing USDC balance is
closer to a regulated brokerage account than to actual self-custodied
money. The only money you genuinely control is Bitcoin you hold the
keys to.

But the banks aren’t fighting CLARITY because they care about your
sovereignty. They’re fighting it because they’re about to lose their
monopoly on the deposit-and-interest spread that funds the entire
commercial banking franchise. Rothbard would have grinned.

This is what monetary incumbents always do when their monopoly on
the rails is threatened. Mises wrote about it. Rothbard wrote about
it. The state and the banking cartel have spent a century building
the existing system, and they’re not going to give up the seat
without a fight. Bitcoin is the first piece of money in human history
that they can’t print, debase, or seize at scale. CLARITY would
codify that reality into U.S. law. Dimon understands what’s at stake.
So should you.

Meanwhile, Kevin Warsh was confirmed as Fed Chair,
54-45. Warsh is the first Fed chair in Bitcoin’s history who has
publicly used the words “innovation” and “digital
assets” in the same sentence. He replaced Powell. The regulatory
direction in the United States has changed permanently. Not because
of any single vote, but because the institutional architecture is
shifting.

§The escape hatch went international

While Washington fought over monetary rails, the rest of the world
just used what works without their permission.

Russia passed a bill in May enabling Bitcoin for international
trade, explicitly designed to bypass SWIFT and Western financial
sanctions. Iran launched Hormuz Safe, a Bitcoin-settled maritime
insurance platform for ships crossing the Strait of Hormuz. The
Tether/Tron/TRM Labs T3 Financial Crime Unit froze over $450 million
in illicit USDT across 23 countries.

You see what’s happening here? Every nation that finds itself
outside the dollar system, or every nation that fears being put
outside it, now has a tool. That tool is Bitcoin. The “Bitcoin
is just for speculators” argument gets weaker every month a
sanctioned country uses it for ship insurance.

This is the part Mises understood instinctively. Monetary
sovereignty isn’t an abstraction. It’s the difference between being
inside a system that can freeze you and having an alternative that
they can’t touch. Bitcoin doesn’t ask permission. It doesn’t care
about your passport. It just clears.

§The macro counterweight (and why it’s actually
bullish)

Late in the month, the macro story turned mixed. Fed Chair Lisa
Cook (still serving until Warsh fully took over) said she was
prepared to raise rates if inflation didn’t ease. Polymarket showed
odds of a 2026 rate hike climbing, briefly touching 48%, settling
around 32% by month-end. Stagflation talk reemerged. Oil stayed
elevated thanks to Iran tensions. Gold ran toward $5,000.

Konrad nailed the framing in his final May update: stagflation is
the Fed’s nightmare scenario. If they hike to fight inflation, they
crush an already-stalling economy. If they cut to save growth, they
let inflation run hot. Either path is bad for traditional portfolios.
Both paths are good for hard assets.

Bitcoin doesn’t care which lever Powell-then-Warsh pulls. The
protocol issues 3.125 BTC per block regardless. Supply is supply.
When the Fed is trapped between bad options, scarce assets become the
only sane bid.

Historically, hard assets like real estate, commodities, and
precious metals outperform stocks and bonds during stagflation.
Bitcoin is the hardest asset ever discovered. The math gets less
debatable every cycle.

§The Mark Cuban lesson

On May 23rd, Mark Cuban announced he had sold most of his Bitcoin.
His stated reason: Bitcoin “lost the plot” as a hedge
against fiat weakness and geopolitical risk, citing the Iran conflict
specifically.

The next 24 hours, Bitcoin rallied $90 billion in market cap on a
short squeeze. BlackRock added another $600 million. Bernstein
published a note attributing the rebound to “a more resilient
long-term holder base.”

So a famous billionaire investor sold near a local bottom, gave a
public reason for it, and the world’s largest asset manager bought
the same week. One of those two parties is going to look very smart
in 12 months and one is going to look like they timed the market
badly. History suggests which is which.

The lesson isn’t “Mark Cuban is dumb” (although that’s
debatable). The lesson is that timing the market is
borderline impossible, even for people with information
advantages and unlimited capital. Cuban tried to time it. He picked a
moment when the headlines validated his framing. He sold. The price
went up.

This is why we DCA. Not because dollar-cost averaging is clever.
It’s the most strait-forward investment strategy in the world. That’s
its strength. It removes the timing decision. It removes the
emotional reaction. It removes the temptation to be smart at exactly
the moment the market is rewarding patience instead of intelligence.

Bitcoiners have said this for years. The institutions have, after
15 years of resistance, started doing the same thing. They build the
wrapper, they fill it on a schedule, and they don’t sell. Morgan
Stanley deployed $193 million into ETF infrastructure before buying a
single sat. That’s how institutional capital deployment actually
works. Build the rails, then fill them, then hold.

You can do the same thing. The amount doesn’t matter. The schedule
does.

§The Canadian angle

Quick note for our home audience: Bitcoin closed May at $99,706
CAD.

That’s a sub-six-figure entry for the same asset that traded north
of $109,000 CAD a few weeks ago. The loonie held relatively strong
against the U.S. dollar (DXY ~99). The Bank of Canada is on hold.
Your exchange rate isn’t getting eroded by rate moves while you
stack.

Canadians don’t usually get a tailwind on Bitcoin. We got one in
May. If you’ve been waiting for a pullback that wasn’t catastrophic,
you got one. The window won’t stay open forever.

§What May actually meant

So here’s the read.

May 2026 was the month Bitcoin’s bear market ended on the chart,
the institutional accumulation phase reached escape velocity, and the
legacy financial system revealed it would fight the transition in
public. Three things at once. The kind of month that, looking back
five years from now, will probably look like an obvious inflection
point.

The technical signal: confirmed.

The institutional base: built.

The sovereignty battle: opened.

Bitcoin Pizza Day on May 22nd marked 16 years since Laszlo Hanyecz
paid 10,000 BTC for two pizzas. Those coins are worth approximately
$747 million today. The lesson of that story has never been “look
how cheap Bitcoin used to be.” The lesson is that the
people who held, through the volatility, through the FUD, through the
famous-investor sell-offs, through the regulatory uncertainty, are
the ones who compounded sovereignty into generational wealth.

What BlackRock is doing at $600 million a clip, you can do at $50
a week.

Texas chose self-custody over an ETF. SpaceX has been holding for
years. Sovereign funds are accumulating. Schwab clients now hold
actual Bitcoin in their actual accounts. The infrastructure for
participation has never been better. The reasons not to start have
never been weaker.

If you haven’t set up your DCA yet, do it this week. Pick an
amount you won’t miss. Set the schedule and forget about the price.
Let Bitcoin do its work and let time do yours.

Family is the only thing in the universe more scarce than Bitcoin,
as Konrad reminded us on Mother’s Day weekend. Cherish them. Stack
sats on autopilot. The cycle works in your favor when you stop trying
to outsmart it.

Bear market over. Sovereignty fight begun. See you in June.