Ki Young Ju, co-founder of CryptoQuant, tweeted that the circulation speed of Bitcoin is at its lowest point in three years. This situation has two aspects. It can be seen as positive because whales are holding onto it, or it can be seen as negative because it has not been transferred to new investors.

Bitcoin's price has retraced to around $26,000 after a brief surge earlier this week. However, on-chain data shows that the supply of Bitcoin held on exchanges has dropped to a six-year low, indicating that investors are holding onto their assets instead of selling. Additionally, Bitcoin whales have been accumulating more Bitcoin since last week's market crash, with over $300 million worth of Bitcoin accumulated so far.

Bitcoin briefly fell below $26,000 and is now priced at $26,000.2, with a 24-hour decline of 0.56%.

Bitcoin and Ether have seen modest gains in the past 24 hours, but their prices remain below levels that would cause "maximum pain" for buyers of August expiry option contracts. Deribit, the world's leading crypto options exchange, will settle 72,000 BTC August options contracts worth $1.9 billion and 535,000 ETH options contracts valued at $893 million on Friday.

According to onchain data, short-term holders of Bitcoin are currently experiencing unrealized losses after the recent price drop. Around 88.3% of the supply controlled by short-term holders has dropped into unrealized losses, with only 11.7% still in profit.

BTC.com data shows that the Bitcoin mining difficulty adjustment was reached at 01:16 today (block height 804384), and the mining difficulty was increased by 6.17% to 55.62T, reaching a new historical high, The current average network computing power is 398.32 EH/s.

August 22nd, according to Dune data, the total amount of Bitcoin NFT protocol Ordinals inscriptions has exceeded 25 million, reaching 25,864,762 so far, with accumulated fee income exceeding 1926 BTC.

An unidentified entity has amassed over $3 billion worth of Bitcoin, making it the third-largest Bitcoin address in the world. The wallet began accumulating in mid-May and has not sold any coins since its inception. The address has received varying amounts of BTC, with the most recent being 6,600 BTC, and currently holds 118,300 BTC. While it is possible that the wallet belongs to a crypto exchange, it could also be a new whale entering the market.

Bitcoin's volatility has decreased significantly in recent years, but it still remains higher than that of gold. Bloomberg's senior macro strategist, Mike McGlone, believes that Bitcoin's volatility has more room to decrease, making it less risky. However, this decline in volatility may also mean that Bitcoin is unlikely to experience sudden price jumps or reach all-time highs. Despite this, Bitcoin is gaining more adoption in traditional finance, with BlackRock's spot Bitcoin ETF filing being a recent example.

Despite recent price declines and claims that hype around Bitcoin NFTs has died down, ordinal inscriptions continue to dominate activity on the Bitcoin network. On August 21st, developer "Leonidas" noted that 84.9% of the network's activity was related to Ordinals, with 450,785 of the past 24 hours' 530,788 transactions being Ordinals-related.