Bitcoin price rally nears eight-month high before pullback

The latest leg of the bitcoin price rally capped a weekend climb that built through Sunday, pushing back toward an eight-month high early Monday and topping eighty-six thousand six hundred dollars in Asian trading, according to CoinGecko data reported by Unchained. That left it about five hundred dollars short of its late-September peak above eighty-seven thousand, the highest level since January, before sellers knocked it back under eighty-six thousand during Monday's Asian hours. It marks the second time in a week that a rally has stalled just below the late-September top. A soft United States jobs report released Friday is doing most of the lifting, as traders dial back bets that the Federal Reserve will raise interest rates again this month.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics said employers added just twenty-nine thousand jobs in September, far below the twelve-month average of forty-five thousand a month. The unemployment rate stood at four point two percent, and the agency revised July to a loss of ten thousand jobs and August to a gain of one hundred thirty-three thousand, cutting a combined sixty thousand from the two months' first estimates. Average hourly earnings rose one-tenth of a percent on the month and three percent from a year earlier.

Economists had expected a gain of more than eighty thousand, and traders responded by trimming bets on a hike at the Fed's late-October decision: CME's FedWatch tool put the odds of a quarter-point increase at seventeen percent after the report, down from close to thirty-six percent a week earlier. "This report strengthens the case for the Federal Reserve to remain patient," Adam Schickling, a senior economist at Vanguard, said in comments published by CNBC.

Bitcoin funds keep pulling in cash while ether cools

United States spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds recorded a third consecutive week of net inflows, adding more than two hundred forty-one million dollars last week and lifting cumulative net inflows to nearly fifty-seven point eight billion, according to SoSoValue data reported by CoinTelegraph. The funds had taken in two point four billion and six point two million dollars in the two preceding weeks, leaving year-to-date net inflows at roughly one point two billion.

Ether funds swung the other way, posting one hundred thirty-eight million dollars in weekly net outflows after drawing six hundred ninety million the week before, though year-to-date net inflows still stood near one point five billion. Zcash funds posted their first weekly outflow on record at about ninety-four million dollars, while Solana and XRP funds extended their inflow streaks with two point four million and four point seven million dollars respectively. CoinMarketCap's Fear and Greed Index read seventy on its zero-to-one-hundred scale, still sitting in Greed territory.

Ethereum's Glamsterdam upgrade heads to the Sepolia testnet

Ethereum developers have locked in Tuesday for the next major test of the network's Glamsterdam upgrade, which will activate on the public Sepolia testnet. The Ethereum Foundation confirmed the date in an announcement, saying node operators must update both their execution-layer and consensus-layer clients before the fork. Glamsterdam combines the Amsterdam execution-layer upgrade with the Gloas consensus-layer upgrade. Its headliners include enshrined proposer-builder separation, known as EIP-7732, which formally moves the handoff between specialized block builders and validators into the protocol; block-level access lists, or EIP-7928, which record the accounts and storage locations used during each block and open the door to parallel execution; and gas pricing changes meant to better reflect the cost of creating and accessing data.

Contracts that rely on fixed gas stipends or hardcoded gas limits may need changes, the foundation warned. Mainnet users and ether holders do not need to take any action. No dates have been set for the validator-focused Hoodi testnet or for mainnet, though developers are targeting the fourth quarter of this year, with the Hegota upgrade expected to follow in 2027.

Macro traders get a busy slate from here: the Federal Reserve publishes minutes from its mid-September meeting on Wednesday, weekly jobless claims land on Thursday, and the TOKEN2049 conference in Singapore runs later in the week. Technicians say a daily close above the late-September top would be the first clear sign that buyers can break through, according to CoinDesk, a view echoed in recent Wall Street forecasts tied to ETF demand. The calendar also offers a seasonal tailwind, since October has averaged nearly nineteen percent upside for bitcoin since twenty thirteen, the strongest monthly record on the calendar. Whether that history repeats will depend on the forces behind the bitcoin price rally right now: soft labor data, a patient central bank, and steady institutional demand flowing through the ETF market.