Who Holds the Pricing Power of Bitcoin? Years ago, pricing power was held by Chinese miners and exchanges; now it's in the hands of Wall Street in the US. Large-scale selling in US spot Bitcoin ETFs causes Bitcoin to fall; large-scale buying causes it to rise—it's that simple. From November 2nd to 6th, US spot Bitcoin ETFs saw a net outflow of $1.282 billion, the worst week since the end of June. BlackRock's IBIT alone saw an outflow of $1.21 billion, accumulating a total outflow of $1.66 billion over seven consecutive trading days. BTC plummeted from over $80,000 to $74,000. So where are these Wall Street giants' coins being held? Aren't institutions like BlackRock and Strategy worried about theft, holding hundreds of thousands of Bitcoins? The answer lies in their custody lists. BlackRock's IBIT's underlying Bitcoins are held in custody by Coinbase. Strategy holds 848,500 Bitcoins, held in custody by Coinbase, Fidelity, and Anchorage. Coinbase... Storing 354,000 Bitcoins Over 80% of the assets in US Bitcoin ETFs are held in custody by Coinbase. So how does Coinbase earn the trust of investors? 1/ Over 99% of assets are held in cold wallets; hot wallets only hold enough for daily withdrawals, with any excess transferred back to cold wallets. 2/ Private keys are split and distributed across multiple systems; they are not reassembled into a complete private key when signing transactions; transfers from cold wallets to hot wallets are intercepted and investigated upon anomaly, and there is an emergency stop switch. 3/ Listed on Nasdaq, quarterly financial reports are reviewed by external auditors, and annual reports are submitted to the SEC; cash reserves are $8.6 billion, accounting for 2.3% of the $377 billion in assets under custody. 4/ AI is used for adversarial testing and contract auditing; fraud prevention includes call confirmation prompts, tests before large transfers, and on-chain address risk scoring. The industry was unaffected by this recent hot wallet theft incident. Being backward means being vulnerable. Hackers are fair; they target the weak. Even now... Coinbase isn't immune to security risks either. Technology evolves, and so do attacks. Therefore, all exchanges in the industry must continuously invest money, personnel, and technology in security.