BTC $77K, Wall Street Wins, & Allbirds Pivot

View from the Arch #128

April 17, 2026

Bitcoin up almost 10% this week? Could we be so back?

This Week in Crypto

Bitcoin climbed back above $75K this week and is currently hovering around $77,800, hitting a one-month high! 

  • Finally, am I right?

  • The recovery does look a little better than it feels unfortunately. Bitcoin almost hit $76K on Tuesday before pulling back, extending a two-month struggle to hold a real breakout. 

  • The bullish read, if you want one: funding rates on Binance’s perpetuals have been negative for 46 straight days, matching bearish positioning levels last seen after the FTX collapse and China’s mining ban. Those were periods that, in hindsight, turned out to be excellent entry points. 

    • On the other hand, we have been doing the “this is a great entry point” for a while now…

The week’s price action was once again a hostage to the Iran situation.

  • Markets rallied Tuesday as President Trump signaled imminent Iran peace negotiations, pushing BTC and ETH to their highest levels since February. 

    • Nearly $440M was liquidated in 24 hours, with $240M of that coming from short positions. 

An interesting disconnect this week: ETH processed a record 200.4M base-layer transactions in Q1 2026 - the first time it’s crossed that threshold in a single quarter, up 43% from Q4 and more than double the 2023 lows.

  • ETH is still down over 50% from its August 2025 peak near $5,000, trading around $2,300. 

  • The network is busier than ever, but the token hasn’t gotten the memo.

This Week in TradFi

While the rest of us were stress-eating and refreshing geopolitical news alerts (just me?), Wall Street was having a genuinely excellent week.

  • The S&P 500 closed above 7,000 for the first time in history on Wednesday, and the Nasdaq posted its longest winning streak since 2009.

    • The rally boils down to one theme: Iran peace optimism in, everything else out. 

  • The backdrop for all of this was bank earnings, which were remarkably…good?

    • JP Morgan’s traders posted their highest-ever quarterly revenue - $11.6B in Q1, up 20% YoY. 

    • Goldman Sachs also topped up expectations on record equities trading revenue, with profit up 19% and revenue rising 14% to $17.23B. 

    • Morgan Stanley reported net revenues of $20.6B.

    • The theme across all of them: volatility is bad for the economy but extremely good for trading desks.

This Week in Tech

This story has been beaten to death, but just in case you've been living under a rock (or inside an Allbirds store that's been shuttered since January…) -

  • Allbirds, which had a market cap of about $21M at Tuesday’s close, down from a $4B peak in its heyday, announced Wednesday that it was selling its footwear assets and pivoting to AI compute infrastructure, renaming itself “NewBird AI”. 

  • The stock soared 600% on the news but then sank 36% the next day. 

  • The company’s plan is to acquire high-performance GPUs and offer them under long-term lease arrangements as a GPU-as-a-service provider. 

  • There is one historical parallel: in 2017, Long Island Iced Tea rebranded as Long Blockchain Corp during the Bitcoin boom, sending shares up nearly 400%, before the SEC eventually delisted them (and charged three people with insider trading). 

Amazon announced it would acquire satellite operator Globalstar for roughly $11.6B, a direct bid to prevent Elon Musk’s Starlink from running away with the satellite internet category. 

  • The deal adds Globalstar's low-Earth orbit satellites, spectrum, and direct-to-device expertise, with Amazon also partnering with Apple to power satellite connectivity for future iPhone and Apple Watch models.

As usual, below are some fundraising announcements, M&A, and tech personnel changes that caught our eye:

Arch is building a next-gen wealth management platform for individuals holding Alternative Assets. Our flagship product is the crypto-backed loan, which allows you to securely and affordably borrow against your crypto.

Disclaimer: None of the above is financial advice, seriously.