The recent crypto crash resumed today, February 27, as investors booked 
profits and as geopolitical risks in the Middle East escalated. Bitcoin (BTC) 
price retreated below $66,000, while the market of all tokens retreated by 
2.85% in the last 24…

Crypto crash resumes as odds of US attacking Iran jumps

BestChange positions itself as a long-running exchange aggregator helping 
users compare rates, liquidity, and reliability across 670+ services in one 
interface. #projectreview

Comparing crypto exchange aggregators: A look at BestChange

Barclays&#8217; blockchain exploration signals a shift towards digital asset 
integration, potentially transforming global banking and payment systems.
The post Banking giant Barclays explores blockchain platform for payments and 
tokenized deposits appeared first on Crypto Briefing.

Banking giant Barclays explores blockchain platform for payments and tokenized deposits

Hyperliquid price trades near $28 as traders watch a potential $30 breakout 
driven by the HIP-6 token launch proposal. Hyperliquid (HYPE) is trading at 
$28.04 at press time, down 0.8% over the past 24 hours. The token has fallen 
5%…

Hyperliquid price eyes $30 breakout amid HIP-6 token launch vote

Fidelity Digital Assets argues Bitcoin’s market structure has shifted enough 
that the familiar four-year boom-bust pattern and the brutal 80% drawdowns 
that often followed, may no longer be the default outcome. In a Feb. 24 
research note titled “Is Bitcoin’s Four-Year Cycle Over?” research analyst 
Zack Wainwright frames the call around a simple observation: Bitcoin is now a 
very different-sized asset with a very different buyer base. Fidelity pegs 
Bitcoin’s market cap at an all-time high of roughly $2.5 trillion as of 
October 2025, alongside signs of deeper liquidity and a steadier volatility 
regime than prior cycles. “As bitcoin matures, price behavior is diverging 
from previous cycles. Volatility decreasing even as price reached new highs 
above $126,000.” Bitcoin Demand Is Being Re-Shaped Fidelity’s volatility 
argument leans on one-year realized volatility and how it behaved around cycle 
peaks. In prior cycles, the pattern was broadly consistent: volatility would 
compress into new lows ahead of a major upside move toward new highs, then 
expand as the cycle overheated. Related Reading: Bitcoin Yet To See Meaningful 
Capital Return, Glassnode Says This time, Fidelity says the compression is 
arriving sooner after the peak. The note points to 17 new all-time lows in 
one-year realized volatility logged in January 2026—just months after Bitcoin 
notched fresh all-time highs in October 2025—calling it a meaningful 
divergence from the cadence of earlier cycles. The team attributes part of 
that dampening to scale: Bitcoin is about twice the market cap it was at the 
2021 peak, roughly 10x 2017’s peak, and over 200x 2013’s. The second pillar is 
who is holding supply, and how sticky that demand appears. Fidelity highlights 
a cohort of 49 public companies holding more than 1,000 BTC each, with 
combined holdings above 1 million BTC, over 5% of circulating supply. It also 
notes that, since Q1 2020, this group increased holdings quarter-over-quarter 
in every quarter except Q2 2022, when Tesla sold a large portion of its 
position. On the ETF side, Fidelity writes that US spot Bitcoin ETFs launched 
in January 2024 and collectively held nearly 1.3 million BTC as of Jan. 30, 
2026, about 6.4% of circulating supply. The note adds that the category leader 
surpassed $75 billion in assets under management in under two years, 
contrasting that pace with gold’s flagship ETF, GLD, which took nearly seven 
years to reach the same milestone. Together, Fidelity says public companies 
and ETFs now hold nearly 12% of circulating supply, with most of the growth 
coming after 2023—a demand shift the team views as structurally important for 
drawdowns. Related Reading: Bitcoin Spot Volumes Sink To 2024 Lows As Coinbase 
Selling Pressure Eases Fidelity also argues the cycle has looked “notably 
stable” across several on-chain and issuance-linked measures. Using a profit- 
window framework, when addresses in profit first exceed 95% through the last 
time they remain above 95%, the note says MVRV has stayed roughly around two 
times realized value through most of the bull market, rather than spiking 
toward four-to-six times as in earlier cycles. The report flags a 
counterfactual to illustrate the point: if market cap reached four times 
realized cap in this cycle, it would imply roughly a $4.5 trillion market cap 
and about $225,000 per BTC as of Feb. 2, 2026. It also notes the Puell 
Multiple has stayed close to one, signaling daily issuance value hasn’t 
meaningfully deviated from its one-year average. Fidelity’s new “Profit to 
Volatility Ratio” is where the drawdown claim becomes explicit. The team sets 
0.01 as a stability line and says the ratio has stayed above 0.015 since late 
2023, the longest sustained period at those levels in Bitcoin’s history. Even 
with a February 2026 downturn that pushed BTC below $70,000, the ratio 
remained above the threshold. “A measurement above 0.01 can be considered very 
stable. Conversely, a measurement below 0.01 should be viewed with caution.” 
The implication, Fidelity suggests, is not that volatility disappears—but that 
the classic cycle-ending wipeouts may be less likely in a market increasingly 
shaped by institutional channels and a larger, more liquid base. If that 
regime holds, the next phase could look less like a blow-off top and more like 
a slower, more methodical repricing, higher over time, but with fewer cliff- 
edge resets. At press time, BTC traded at $66,677. Featured image created with 
DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com

Cryptocurrency price in GBP