The Hike Bet Died and Bitcoin Barely Moved: Grading K1, K2, N1, N2, L1, L2 and M2 After the Payrolls Shock

Friday was the deadline this column set for itself. Six markers — laid down across the past two weeks with hard numbers and hard dates — came due at the close, and the July jobs report that landed at 8:30 a.m. ET detonated most of the board at once: payrolls minus 23,000 against a consensus near plus 83,000 (BLS, August 7). Here is every grade, including the ones that embarrass us.

K1 — September hike odds: FAIL

The marker: CME FedWatch September hike odds at or above roughly 76% by Friday’s close, the level from which they crashed on Monday’s yen-intervention shock. The path was extraordinary — 55.9% Monday, 61.9% Wednesday, 74.5% Friday morning per CoinNess-cited FedWatch data — meaning the market had recovered essentially the entire crash before a single data point printed. Then the data printed. By Friday afternoon, futures markets priced roughly a 56% chance of a September pause, per The Block — hike odds collapsing to the low-40s. K1 fails, and the lesson is sharper than the grade: odds that round-trip 20 points on no data are telling you about positioning, not policy. The catalyst, when it finally arrived, mattered more than the drift.

M2 — the sub-50% watch: FIRED

M2 was armed as the mirror-image marker: September hike odds printing below 50% at any close before August 12’s CPI. One negative payrolls print did it in an afternoon. With pause probability near 56%, the hike is now the minority case for the first time since the July FOMC’s hawkish hold. What resurrects it is no mystery: a hot core CPI on Wednesday. That is what our new R-series is built around, below.

K2 — MSTR’s $98 band: PASS, and a broken frame

On Thursday we wrote that Strategy’s stock closing at $96.85 — below the $98 mid-band on a drift day — meant K2 would grade FAIL “unless $98 is reclaimed today,” and we added a flourish: bands that break on drift stay broken. Friday falsified the flourish. MSTR closed at $100.01, up 3.3%, after trading as high as $105.50 intraday per Yahoo Finance daily data — the rate-relief bid hit leveraged-Bitcoin proxies harder than Bitcoin itself. K2 passes on the reclaim. But we are logging the miss in the frame: a band break on drift held for exactly one session because a macro catalyst was scheduled the next morning. Breaks that occur into a known catalyst carry an asterisk. Noted, and absorbed.

N1 recap and the flow tape: PASS, extended

N1 settled early and passed on Thursday — $455.5 million of settled inflows across the August 4–5 Farside cells against the $300 million bar, a 2.9× beat. Friday’s addendum: the August 6 cell settled at +$137.6 million (IBIT +$128.3M, HODL +$14.9M, FBTC +$11.2M, EZBC +$7.5M, BTCO +$6.8M, BITB +$1.7M, GBTC −$32.8M), stretching the streak to four sessions and roughly $763.6 million, with IBIT supplying almost 80% of the total per Farside data. Note the breadth reading: six issuers positive on a middling-magnitude day — the breadth-then-magnitude lens keeps earning its place. The handoff thesis — corporate treasury bid out, ETF bid in — enters CPI week intact.

N2 — the gap marker: FIRED

N2 asked whether the divergence that defined last week would survive this one: an S&P 500 record close this week AND Bitcoin below $66,000 through Friday. Both legs landed. The S&P printed records Monday, Tuesday and again Friday at 7,757.64 (CNBC); Bitcoin’s best tag of the entire week was Friday’s post-NFP spike to roughly $65,300 (The Block) — never $66,000, and never even a daily close above $65,000. The gap did not close on a week in which the S&P rose 3.58% and hike odds died. That is the most bearish-relative fact on the board, and it is now confirmed by marker, not vibe: whatever is holding Bitcoin back, it is not the Fed alone.

L2 — the +1.5% day: FAIL

L2 needed a single +1.5% daily close before the Friday deadline. It never came — not even on jobs day. Bitcoin’s Friday session ran from roughly $64,300 pre-release (CoinDesk) to a $64,940 close, a gain of about 1% — the closest approach of the window, and still short. Two months of realized-volatility compression have now survived an intervention shock, a treasury-company inversion, and a negative payrolls print. Q2 — a daily close outside $62,000–$65,000 before Wednesday’s CPI — is the last compression marker standing, and it has four sessions left.

L1 — Coldcard coins: closes NOT FIRED

L1’s window closed Saturday: would the Coldcard attackers cash out? The answer, per the tracking firms, is still no — mostly. TRM Labs reports 100% of the Bitcoin taken in the first three waves (the bulk of a theft it sizes at $116 million; TechCrunch, citing later totals, puts the running figure above $130 million and roughly 1,596 BTC) remains parked in attacker-controlled addresses, and roughly 90% of all stolen coins have not moved. Chainalysis, tracking in real time, does flag movement at the margin: consolidation wallets, cross-chain hops, and Tornado Cash deposits from later waves, with Galaxy having supplied some 600 suspected attacker addresses to US federal law enforcement and exchanges. No confirmed exchange cash-out of wave-one-through-three coins by our deadline means L1 closes NOT FIRED. The coins are marked, the exits are watched, and the attackers appear to know it.

The scorecard

New markers: the R-series, built for CPI week

Per house rules — thresholds set away from spot, graded on settlement, catalyst-conditioned after K1’s lesson. R1 (re-hawking test): July core CPI prints ≥0.3% month-over-month on Wednesday AND September hike odds close back above 50% on Thursday, August 13. Both legs or no fire — this is a test of whether one inflation print can undo one jobs print. R2 (streak persistence): the settled Farside cells for August 7, 10 and 11 sum to ≥ +$400 million, graded on settlement, expected around August 12–13 — does the ETF bid buy the CPI dip-risk or front-run it? R3 (oil leg): Brent settles above $90 on any day before August 14 — armed on the Hormuz fee dispute and Friday’s reported Iranian strikes on “hostile targets” in the strait (Bloomberg); Brent enters the weekend near $82. Carried live: Q1 (Strategy’s Monday 8-K — any further sale of any size = policy, not one-off), Q2 (the $62–65K band break before CPI), Q3 (Riot names an earnings date by Wednesday), M3 (BIP-110 window event, grading Monday), H1 (closes Monday).

One more piece of arithmetic deserves the record before CPI week begins, because it quantifies N2’s discomfort. Four days of ETF inflows absorbed roughly $763.6 million — call it 11,800 BTC at an average price near $64,700 — while new issuance ran about 450 BTC per day, or roughly 1,800 BTC over the same window. Demand through the wrapper alone ran better than six times new supply, Strategy’s reported selling pace added only about $15 million a day against it, and the price still could not close above $65,000. The implication is that a seller — or an absence of marginal buyers outside the wrapper — large enough to offset a 6-to-1 demand overhang is operating somewhere we cannot see in the flow tape: exchange desks, offshore perps, or miner and treasury distribution that discloses on a lag. We flag it now so next week’s data can confirm or embarrass it.

The through-line into next week is uncomfortable and honest: the Fed-hike thesis died on Friday, and Bitcoin’s reward was about one percent and a rejection under $65,000 — while the S&P made another all-time high. The ETF pipe is open, the macro headwind just weakened, and the price still will not move. Either Wednesday’s CPI resurrects the headwind, or the compression finally resolves without an excuse. Q2 has four sessions.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute investment, financial, or trading advice. Cryptocurrency markets are highly volatile and you can lose your entire investment. Always do your own research and consult a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions.