For months, Bitcoin was stuck. Grinding sideways, faking out traders at $75K, refusing to commit to a direction. That ended this week.

Bitcoin hit $79,000 on Tuesday, an 11-week high, with dynamics for a short squeeze building and institutional money coming in.

Another catalyst: Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) dropped $2.54 billion on 34,164 BTC on April 20, at an average price of $74,395 per coin, according to The Coin Republic. The company now holds 815,061 Bitcoin and is openly marching toward its goal of 1 million BTC. Michael Saylor's conviction is either visionary or insane, and the market is currently voting for visionary.

Crypto stocks ripped alongside BTC. Circle (ticker: CRCL) is up roughly 30% year-to-date, making it the best-performing crypto equity of 2026, driven by explosive stablecoin growth. Strategy continues to trade as a leveraged Bitcoin bet. Coinbase, meanwhile, is lagging the group at down 10% on the year, weighed down by the New York lawsuit we'll get to in the links further down.

What makes this rally different from the false starts earlier this year is the confluence of drivers all hitting at once: institutional buying (Strategy + ETF inflows), macro tailwinds (Iran ceasefire holding, oil prices stabilizing), regulatory clarity (Warsh's hearing, CLARITY Act progress), and post-halving supply dynamics tightening the available float.

The question now is whether $80K acts as a ceiling or a launching pad. Bitcoin briefly touched $78,300 last Friday before pulling back over the weekend, and the push to $79K today suggests the market wants to test five digits starting with an 8. If spot demand holds and the short squeeze continues to build, the path to $80K+ is open.

For the first time in months, the momentum, the flows, and the narrative are all pointing the same direction.

Remember last week when WLFI posted "See you in court, pal" on X? Justin Sun took them up on it.

On Tuesday, Sun filed a lawsuit against World Liberty Financial in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleging fraud, breach of contract, and unjust enrichment, per CoinDesk. The complaint paints a picture of a project that allegedly lured investors with the Trump family's name, then pulled the rug using hidden smart contract mechanisms.

Here's what Sun claims happened: He invested $75 million in WLFI tokens in late 2024, based partly on the project's association with the Trump family. At their peak, his 2.9 billion WLFI tokens were worth over $1 billion. Then, according to the lawsuit, WLFI used a "hidden backdoor blacklisting function" in its smart contracts to freeze Sun's entire position. The tokens are now worth roughly $75 million once again, and he can't sell any of them.

Sun is walking a tightrope politically. In the filing, he said he "tried in good faith to resolve this situation" and reaffirmed his personal support for President Trump, distancing the president from the project's day-to-day operations. He attributed the conflict to "certain individuals on the project team" acting contrary to the administration's values of financial freedom, per Yahoo Finance.

WLFI hasn't publicly responded to the lawsuit yet. But given that they threatened legal action first, this is the crypto version of "be careful what you wish for."

The bigger question is what this means for the Trump family's crypto brand. WLFI's token is down 76% from its September all-time high. Its biggest investor is suing it for fraud. And the project is still sitting on a $75 million loan from Dolomite backed by its own cratering token. If this were a startup without a presidential last name attached to it, we'd be writing the obituary.

Two things happened this week that are decently bullish government signals for Bitcoin. And they happened on the same day!

Admiral Samuel Paparo, Commander of the United States Indo-Pacific Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 21 that Bitcoin is a tool for American "power projection." His exact words, via Bitcoin Magazine: "Bitcoin is a reality, it is a valuable computer science tool as a power projection, and outside of the economic formulation of it, it’s got really important computer science applications for cybersecurity."

When asked by Sen. Tommy Tuberville how U.S. leadership in Bitcoin affects deterrence against China, Paparo responded: "Anything that supports all instruments of national power for the United States of America is to the good," according to the Bitcoin Policy Institute.

This was the first time a combatant commander has publicly characterized Bitcoin as a national security asset in congressional testimony. Let that sink in for a second! The guy responsible for military operations across the Indo-Pacific just told the Senate that Bitcoin makes America stronger.

Meanwhile, across the Capitol, Kevin Warsh, President Trump's nominee for Federal Reserve Chair, told the Senate Banking Committee that cryptocurrencies are "already embedded in the U.S. financial system.” He pushed back on the idea that crypto still sits outside mainstream finance and also called a central bank digital currency (CBDC) a "bad policy choice.”

Oh, and his financial disclosure revealed a TON of crypto-related investments across more than 20 projects, including stakes in Solana, dYdX, Polymarket, and Bitcoin Lightning startup Flashnet. If confirmed, Warsh would be the first Fed Chair with venture capital exposure to the crypto sector.

There's a caveat: Warsh's final confirmation vote timeline remains uncertain, complicated by an ongoing DOJ probe and political jockeying, with outgoing Fed Chair Jerome Powell's term expiring May 15. So the timeline is messy. But the signal is crystal clear.

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That's all for this week. If you wrote it as fiction, your editor would say it was too on the nose. But it’s real!

Let us know if you think Bitcoin will break $80K.

If you enjoyed this, share The Chain with a friend. We'll see you next Thursday.

Until then,
- The Chain Team

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