Bybit CEO Ben Zhou Sees Bitcoin (BTC) Retail Participation Down 30% From Peak

Bybit CEO: Retail Down 30%

Bybit co-founder and CEO Ben Zhou believes the Bitcoin market has bottomed, with retail participation running roughly 30% below cycle-peak levels — and says artificial intelligence could be the next catalyst. In remarks from Paris Blockchain Week circulating over the weekend, Zhou framed AI agents, which will need a native settlement layer for autonomous trading and payments, as a plausible driver of the next leg up, a trend visible in open-weight models reaching 56% of Vercel AI Gateway tokens. He is not alone at the intersection: Hut 8 co-founder Marc van der Chijs has grown uneasy that AI development is outrunning human control, even while reallocating AI profits back into crypto. On Bitcoin itself, Zhou said a recent swing from about $60,000 back to $70,000 keeps it short of mature digital gold, with stablecoins better suited to payments.

A 20-Year Bitcoin Reserve Bill

Washington is moving on a second front: locking the strategic Bitcoin reserve into statute. The House Financial Services Committee has scheduled a Sept. 16 markup of H.R. 8957, the US Reserve Modernization Act 2026, which would convert the current presidential-order reserve into a legally binding regime. Under the draft, any BTC deposited into the reserve carries a minimum 20-year holding obligation — sales, swaps, auctions and pledging are all barred — and the Treasury Secretary must house the reserve inside the department within 180 days of enactment. The markup lands days after the Senate's CLARITY setback, giving the industry regulatory news to track on two tracks at once. It also follows the SEC's five-year tokenized stock exemption, which opened a conditional path for on-chain equity settlement.

Holiday Week, 24/7 Market

While US lawmaking dominates headlines, the market's round-the-clock design is on full display in Japan. Bitcoin trades without weekend or holiday closures, and domestic exchanges such as Coincheck will keep order books open through the Sept. 21–23 Silver Week holidays. The friction is banking, not trading: yen transfers sent Sunday from banks without instant settlement will not reach exchange accounts until Sept. 24, the next business day. Quick-deposit and convenience-store funding carry a further catch — asset movements, including external crypto transfers, are restricted for seven days after deposit. SBI VC Trade accepts deposits around the clock but processes withdrawals within roughly three business days, meaning coins can always be sold, yet cash may not reach a bank account quickly over the break.

Rarity Meter Back to Median

On-chain data is flashing a normalization signal. The Bitcoin Rarity Meter — a composite oscillator that folds capitulation, profit realization, peak regret, seller exhaustion and coins at a loss into one reading — shows BTC has exited the P0.5–P2 percentile band, the rarest pricing territory in its history, and returned to the median zone as of late Saturday. Historically, those sub-P2 conditions coincided with depressed pricing in bear markets and did not persist for long. The reading was taken with BTC near $81,312. It is not a standalone timing tool, but the shift suggests the statistically most extreme undervalued conditions may be behind the market — with the overvaluation side now the watchpoint for the next phase.

CLARITY Failure Outshook the Fed

Policy, not monetary policy, delivered the week's real shock. The Federal Reserve raised rates 0.25 percentage points on Sept. 16 — its first hike in roughly three years, approved 12-0 — yet Bitcoin recovered within hours, as the move had been priced in at better than 90% probability. The Sept. 15 failure of the CLARITY Act cloture vote hit far harder: Bitcoin slid to about $75,000, a multi-week low, and spot Bitcoin ETFs shed roughly $450 million that day versus about $296 million the day after the hike — a sharp reversal from a recent $433 million ETF inflow day. The Senate killed the motion 49-50, short of the 60 votes needed, with four Republicans defecting. With the 10-year Treasury yield above 5% and Bitcoin's gold correlation strengthening while its Nasdaq link weakens, bonds and inflation now set near-term direction; the Bank of England's plan to shrink £368 billion of gilts by 2034 adds a slower global drag.

Two Ancient Whales Wake

The biggest on-chain moves came from long-dormant crypto whale addresses. At block 967,732 on Saturday, an address created Nov. 2, 2011 swept 100 BTC — worth over $8 million with Bitcoin near $82,000 — into a brand-new pay-to-witness-public-key-hash wallet built on Segregated Witness. The holder's cost basis was $3.24 per coin, roughly $324 in total, a gain of 2,469,035%; the receiving address is unrecognized by block-intelligence trackers and unlinked to any exchange or OTC desk, with a privacy score of 55 out of 100 on the block explorer's privacy meter. Ten blocks earlier, four P2PKH wallets from February–March 2013 each moved 25 BTC into a single consolidation at block 967,722 — on-chain analysis points to a former miner routing payouts to Bitgo custody since August 2025, a combined 200 BTC exceeding $16 million. Readers tracking the market in real time can follow live spot and futures prices on Binance.

The $81K Median Test

Read together, the week's tape shows a market absorbing a rate hike, a legislative defeat and 15-year-old coins moving for the first time — without breaking structure. The primary record anchoring this is the on-chain ledger itself: the block 967,732 sweep is immutable proof that early holders are willing to realize gains near $82,000, yet price held the low-$81,000s afterward. Strategy's mNAV finishing the week at 1.2x, its highest reading since mid-June per the company's own data, adds a tentative bid from leveraged treasury vehicles. The test ahead is whether Bitcoin stays inside the median band or revisits the $75,000 floor set by the CLARITY vote — bonds and inflation, not the Fed, will likely decide.