Bitcoin is trading near $65,000 on Friday, July 24, 2026, down about 1.4% over 24 hours, after the most important sentence of the week came not from a trading desk but from the U.S. Capitol: Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Thursday the CLARITY Act likely won't find the runway to pass before the Senate's long summer break, according to CoinDesk. The regulatory optimism that carried BTC to a five-week high of $66,890 on Wednesday, per Yahoo Finance, deflated on contact with the legislative calendar.
The counterweight is the quietest bullish story in the market: U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs have now logged seven consecutive sessions of net inflows — $999.3 million from July 14 through Wednesday, July 22, per settled Farside Investors data — the longest streak since late April, and by some counts the first seven-day run in nine months, per KuCoin News. Thursday's cell was not yet settled at publication.
The tape: $65K holds, sentiment doesn't
As of Friday morning, BTC changes hands at roughly $64,950–$65,050, per Coin Gabbar's July 24 market wrap and Fortune's daily tracker. The total crypto market cap slipped 1.3% to about $2.3 trillion, Bitcoin dominance sits at 56.6%, and the Fear & Greed Index has dropped back to 28 — fear territory, though above the extreme-fear low-20s readings of last week. One anomaly in the red tape: the DeFi sector jumped 9.8% on the day, a rotation into high-beta names that Coin Gabbar's data flags without an obvious single catalyst. For how we read the sentiment gauge, see our Fear & Greed field guide.
Seven green days, one number: $999 million
The streak's arithmetic, from Farside's settled table: +$181.1M (Jul 14), +$107.7M (Jul 15), +$79.1M (Jul 16), +$132.3M (Jul 17), +$226.8M (Jul 20), +$203.2M (Jul 21), +$69.1M (Jul 22). That is not one whale allocation but a drip of daily demand — the pattern flow analysts consider more durable than a single headline print, as Bitcoin.com News notes. BlackRock's IBIT has led nearly every session; Wednesday's tape again showed no fund in net redemption except Grayscale's legacy GBTC, offset by its own Mini Trust. We covered the streak's sixth day in Thursday's report; the mechanics of reading these tables are in our Farside flow guide.
Washington gives, Washington takes
The week's rally was built substantially on the updated CLARITY Act text released Wednesday — the first draft to include the ethics ban on federal officials issuing digital assets, per CNBC. Thune's Thursday comments reframed that progress: text is not floor time. He told reporters he still hopes to get the floor process started before the break, per CoinDesk — but with the Senate expected to leave by August 7 and no cloture motion filed, the window for final passage before September has, in leadership's own telling, effectively closed. Kalshi traders who had pushed vote odds above 72% midweek are now repricing that timeline. Full state of play in today's CLARITY update.
Next test: a Fed that meets in five days
The macro calendar now takes over. The FOMC meets Tuesday–Wednesday, July 28–29, with the CME FedWatch tool pricing roughly an 89% probability of a hold at 3.50%–3.75%, per Forbes' Fed tracker — but with the Fed's preferred inflation gauge at a three-year high, the tone of the hold matters as much as the hold itself. The May PCE report showed headline inflation at 4.1% and core at 3.4%, per Yahoo Finance, keeping rate-hike talk alive. Our full meeting preview — and what a hawkish hold historically does to Bitcoin — is in today's analysis.
Also on the radar internationally: Argentina's government is weighing a sweeping capital-markets deregulation bill that would let investment funds hold Bitcoin and allow digital assets as loan collateral, per Bitcoin.com News — a reminder that while Washington's clock runs out, other jurisdictions keep legislating. And Grayscale's research desk reiterated this week that under its four-year-cycle framework, the bear phase could persist into September or October 2026, per The Cryptonomist — a view the seven-day streak is quietly arguing against.
What we're watching
- Thursday's (Jul 23) Farside cell — does the streak reach eight sessions when it settles?
- Any cloture filing on CLARITY before the Senate leaves — Thune's 'floor process started' promise is the tell.
- FOMC statement and press conference, Wednesday Jul 29, 2:00 p.m. ET.
- The $63,000–$63,500 support band if pre-Fed de-risking accelerates; $67,000–$68,000 resistance overhead.
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