During the 2022 bear market I was immersed in a lot of podcasts but during one of them I listened to was Raoul Pal and he talked about how he thinks that Solana was going to be the big winner from the bear market and he turned out to be very right. because the price went in the $9 range up to $250 at its peak.
But the reason he suspected that it would come out so strong is that the developer community never left even as price and sentiment cratered.
That was the signal in the noise and that’s what I try to spotlight in this newsletter and one of the best sources to look at is River Financial’s Bitcoin Adoption Report that you can read here.
But here’s some of the major highlights of the report.
194 public companies now hold Bitcoin on their balance sheets which 2.5 times more than a year ago.
Merchant adoption of Bitcoin for payments grew 74% in 2025.
The Lightning Network which is Bitcoin’s Layer 2 payments rail surpassed $1 billion in monthly volume which is a 300% growth year over year.
By the way a Layer 2 is basically a place where transactions can be packaged together before being passed through on the main Bitcoin blockchain. It helps to actually create more transactions at lower prices.
Also 23 nation-states now own Bitcoin with 5 new countries joining the club in 2025.
And here’s one that should reframe the entire conversation.
Bitcoin’s average daily price swings in 2025 approached those of gold and the S&P 500. Which means it’s a safer asset and safer assets see larger adoption.
Also the network itself has never been stronger.
Over 24,700 reachable nodes, up 14% and more than 1 zetahash of computational power securing the network. Mining has never been more geographically decentralized, with 34 countries contributing meaningful hashrate.
Bitcoin drew in $742 billion of new investment over its most recent bull market.
And yet. The price is down 24% this month.
We never really know what’s going to end a Bitcoin bear market but the common through line has always been “someone built something useful and that people are actually participating in.”
So to me this is the fundamentals improving while the price goes down, something eventually has to give.
Every company that adds Bitcoin to its balance sheet, every country that starts mining, every merchant that accepts Lightning payments all leads to growth.
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A Bitcoin Miner With Zero Bitcoin
Two companies. Two completely opposite decisions. Same week.
Bitdeer, founded by Jihan Wu who is the man who literally built the machines that mine most of the world’s Bitcoin reported its weekly update on February 20th.
Holdings: 0 BTC.
They mined 189.8 Bitcoin last week and sold every single coin and then they liquidated an additional 943.1 BTC from reserves.
A Bitcoin mining company with no Bitcoin.
Bitdeer is pivoting hard toward AI and high-performance computing and they’re using Bitcoin mining revenue to fund a different future.
Luckily the Bitcoin difficulty adjustment updates every 2 weeks so a miner leaving isn’t a big deal and in fact many miners are leaving.
And to the surprise of absolutely no one, Strategy has kept on buying.
Strategy disclosed another purchase. 592 BTC at $67,286 per coin. Roughly $39.8 million. Their total stack is now 717,722 Bitcoin acquired for $54.56 billion at an average cost of $76,020.
One company mines Bitcoin and sells it all.
The other buys Bitcoin on the open market at a premium during the worst month since 2022 while sitting on billions in unrealized losses.
This isn’t a contradiction. It’s a Rorschach test.
Both can be right in the long run but the conviction in February 2026, there’s only one question that matters for the million-dollar thesis: Who’s going to look smarter in five years?
Every Bitcoin Bitdeer sells hits the market. Every Bitcoin Strategy buys gets locked in cold storage. One side creates supply. The other removes it. And when you zoom out... the buyers of last resort have been the most profitable players in every previous cycle.
February 2026 is ugly. No sugarcoating that.
Bitcoin’s worst month since the TerraUSD collapse.
The “Bitcoin is not digital gold” crowd is taking a victory lap.
Even Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan admits we’re in an awkward maturity phase.
The price tells you what happened yesterday and the data tells you what’s being built for tomorrow and right now, the gap between the two has never been wider.
Stay patient. Stay informed. Stay in the game.
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