Week in crypto: April 13-19 data roundup – the $78K rally nobody believed

🕑 7 min read

Bitcoin hit a 10-week high on Hormuz news while Fear & Greed returned to Extreme Fear – and veteran holders sold at a loss the whole way up.

Bitcoin rallied 13% in two weeks and touched $78,240 – its highest level since February 4. The crowd’s response? Extreme Fear. Again.

The Fear & Greed Index sits at 21, deep in panic territory, despite BTC trading 13% higher than where it started the month. This crypto weekly roundup covers what the data actually showed between April 13 and 19 – and why the on-chain picture looks nothing like the sentiment.

Key Takeaways

• BTC hit $78,240 (highest since Feb 4) after Iran declared the Strait of Hormuz open – then pulled back to $75,727 when Iran re-closed it 24 hours later. Fear & Greed collapsed to 21 despite a 13% two-week rally.
• All-exchange BTC reserves hit a new cycle low of 2,679,635 on April 16 – Binance alone lost 9,029 BTC ($684M). ETFs absorbed $332M in BTC and $300M in ETH, the strongest combined week of 2026.
• Goldman Sachs filed its first Bitcoin ETF, Strategy added 13,927 BTC ($1B), and the SEC clarified most crypto assets aren’t securities – while a fake Ledger app on Apple’s App Store drained $9.5M.

$78K and Hormuz – a rally on a 24-hour promise

$78,240. That’s where BTC briefly traded on April 17 after Iran declared the Strait of Hormuz open to all shipping.

Oil dropped 11% in minutes. Crypto shorts – $810M worth – got obliterated in under a day. BTC surged from $74K to its highest level in 10 weeks while overleveraged bears scrambled to cover.

It lasted 24 hours.

On April 18, the IRGC reversed course, closing the strait again and attacking a tanker with two gunboats near the chokepoint. BTC pulled back to $75,727. The ceasefire, brokered by Pakistan on April 8, expires April 22 – and Trump has signaled he probably won’t extend it.

ETH rode the same wave, touching $2,405 before settling at $2,336 (+5.9% 7d, +14.4% 14d). That makes it the first week since January where ETH actually matched BTC’s percentage gains. XLM was the quiet standout – up 12.4% with minimal buzz. XRP gained 7.4%, HYPE added 6.5%, and LINK rose 5.3%.

But the mood doesn’t match the tape. When BTC traded at $78K in late January, Fear & Greed read 55. Now, at the same price, it reads 21. Same level, opposite psychology – like a sold-out arena sitting in silence while the home team scores.

Exchange reserves crashed to a cycle low – who’s buying?

Reserves should climb during a rally. More selling, more deposits, more supply hitting exchanges. Instead, they cratered.

All-exchange BTC reserves bottomed at 2,679,635 on April 16 – the lowest reading of this entire cycle. By week’s end they’d ticked up to 2,684,463, but the net drain of 7,676 BTC ($581M) speaks for itself.

Binance took the hardest hit. The exchange lost 9,029 BTC – roughly $684M in value walking out the door in seven days.

The drain wasn’t gradual. April 13 saw 5,065 BTC leave, and April 16 was worse – 5,303 BTC in a single day. Inflows returned over the weekend, reversing about $115M, but the weekly outflow still dwarfed anything since February.

MVRV, the ratio comparing market value to the average price at which all BTC last moved on-chain, climbed from 1.306 to 1.397 – a healthy 7% weekly gain, but still nowhere near the overheated zone above 2.0 that preceded previous cycle tops. NUPL, a gauge of net unrealized profit versus loss across all holders, jumped from 0.234 to 0.284. That’s a meaningful recovery from the capitulation territory we flagged three weeks ago.

And then there’s LTH-SOPR, which tracks whether long-term holders sell at a profit or loss. It whipsawed from 1.228 (22.8% profit) on April 13 to 0.769 (23.1% loss) by April 15 – then partially recovered to 0.935. Veterans who survived FTX, Luna, and COVID are still dumping into this rally at a loss.

“Old whales are selling to TradFi,” CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju said. One sentence. The entire week.

That dynamic – old crypto cashing out to new Wall Street – might be the defining shift of 2026. It’s not capitulation in the traditional sense. It’s a generational transfer of conviction.

Goldman’s first Bitcoin ETF and ETH’s strongest flow week

Goldman Sachs filing a Bitcoin ETF would’ve been front-page news two years ago. This week it barely registered.

The covered-call premium income fund, filed under the ’40 Act, targets July 2026 launch. It joins Morgan Stanley’s MSBT (launched April 8 at a market-leading 0.14% fee) and BlackRock’s IBIT, which commands $54B in AUM and 789K BTC. The BTC ETF market now manages $96.5B across over a dozen issuers.

Weekly flows told a clearer story. BTC ETFs pulled in $332M net, recovering from April 13’s $291M outflow day. On April 18 alone, BlackRock clients bought $284M through IBIT.

ETH stole the show. A six-day inflow streak totaling nearly $300M – the strongest sustained buying since spot ETH ETFs launched. Fidelity’s FETH led with $84.1M on April 17. That’s remarkable after five straight months of relentless $2.8B in cumulative outflows finally reversing.

Strategy added 13,927 BTC ($1B) at $71,902 average. Total holdings: 780,897 BTC. The firm is back in profit after BTC cleared its $75,577 breakeven – something that seemed implausible when shares were trading at a 40% discount to NAV just six weeks ago.

DeFi TVL held at $95.4B, up 4.4% week-over-week. Not spectacular. But surviving a Hormuz whipsaw without collapsing counts as structural resilience – a Buffett-style “tide goes out” test that DeFi quietly passed.

RAVE’s 4,800% surge, a fake app, and the SEC

What happens when a token nobody’s heard of rallies 4,800%, enters the top 20, and 90% of its supply sits in three wallets?

Binance and Bitget launched probes into RAVE (RaveDAO) after the token surged from $0.30 to $16.91 before crashing 50%+. Lookonchain flagged 18.58M RAVE ($8M) deposited on Bitget from project-linked wallets. We covered the tokenomics red flags last week – and they played out on schedule.

On the security front, a counterfeit Ledger app made it onto Apple’s App Store and drained $9.5M from 50+ victims across five chains. Hardware wallet users – supposedly crypto’s most security-conscious cohort – got hit by old-school social engineering that bypassed every on-chain safeguard. The irony burns.

In regulatory news that deserved more attention, the SEC issued a formal clarification stating most crypto assets aren’t themselves securities. And Senator Lummis warned Congress to pass the CLARITY Act before November midterms – or risk a delay until 2030.

The last time a rally felt this wrong

December 2022 offers the closest parallel. NUPL was recovering from 0.18 toward 0.28 – almost identical to this week’s 0.234-to-0.284 trajectory. Fear & Greed had touched single digits, snapped higher, then fallen back. Exchange reserves were declining. LTH-SOPR sat below 1.0.

What followed: BTC rallied from $16,500 to $25,000 (+52%) in 60 days.

The setup rhymes – but BTC sat at $16K back then versus $75K now, backed by institutional plumbing that didn’t exist at the time: $96.5B in ETF assets, Goldman Sachs filing its first fund, and over $135B in stablecoin dry powder (SSR, the ratio of BTC market cap to stablecoin supply, sits at 11.17). If the percentage pattern repeats, BTC clears $114K. If Hormuz stays closed and the FOMC on April 29 turns hawkish, $70K support gets tested first.

Weekly data comparison

On-chain scorecard (7 of 12 bullish)

✅ BTC price: +5.9% 7d, +13% 14d – strongest rally since January
✅ ETH price: +5.9% 7d, +14.4% 14d – matched BTC for first time in months
✅ MVRV: 1.397, rising – healthy but not overheated
✅ NUPL: 0.284, recovering from capitulation zone
✅ Exchange reserves: cycle low 2,679,635 – supply squeeze deepening
✅ ETF flows: +$332M BTC, +$300M ETH – strongest combined week of 2026
✅ DeFi TVL: $95.4B (+4.4% w/w) – held through Hormuz volatility
⚠️ SOPR: 0.999, oscillating at breakeven – not confirmed above 1.0
⚠️ LTH-SOPR: 0.935, veterans selling at 6.5% loss into rally
⚠️ Fear & Greed: 21 (Extreme Fear) at $75K+ – widest divergence of 2026
⚠️ Binance flows: weekly outflows reversed to inflows on Apr 18-19
❌ Geopolitics: Hormuz re-closed, ceasefire expires Apr 22, FOMC Apr 29

What to watch next week

• Iran ceasefire expiration April 22. If Trump doesn’t extend and Hormuz stays closed, expect another volatility spike. BTC holding above $72K through the expiry would confirm structural demand underneath this rally.
• FOMC meeting April 29. Zero chance of a cut is priced in, but forward guidance matters. A hawkish shift on inflation pushes BTC toward $70K support.
• SOPR sustained above 1.0 for 3+ consecutive days would confirm the trend reversal from loss-taking to profit-taking. Currently oscillating at 0.999 – close, but sellers haven’t fully flipped yet.

For deeper analysis, see our Bitcoin price analysis hub and Ethereum price analysis hub.

Exchange reserves hit a cycle low while the price rallied to $78K – but LTH-SOPR says veterans are still selling at a loss. Who cracks first: the fear or the fundamentals?

This is not financial advice. DYOR. Data as of April 19, 2026.

Sources

• CoinGecko – prices, market caps, supply data
• CryptoQuant – SOPR, MVRV, NUPL, Puell, SSR, exchange reserves, netflows
• Farside Investors – ETF daily flow data
• DefiLlama – DeFi TVL
• SEC.gov – Press Release 2026-30
• Al Jazeera, CNBC, NPR – Iran/Hormuz coverage