Crypto market weekly review: Oct 19 – Oct 25, 2026

Bitcoin posted its third losing week in a row from Oct. 19 to Oct. 25, falling 2.4% to a $80,154 close on Binance 4-hour candles. Through Wednesday the market ran on ETF inflows and reached $84,898; then it gave everything back in four days. On Thursday the Nasdaq had its worst session since June on doubts about the payoff from AI spending, spot bitcoin ETFs lost $635.5M in one day, and on Saturday thin weekend liquidity pushed the price through $80,000 to a $79,221 low. For today's picture, see the daily brief; last week's edition is here: review for Oct. 12⁠–⁠18.

The week in 5 points

BTC −2.4% on the week: open $82,116, close $80,154, high $84,898 (Wednesday, Oct. 21, noon–4 PM ET candle), low $79,221 (Saturday, Oct. 24, 8 AM–noon ET candle) on Binance 4-hour candles. The $5,677 range equals 6.9% of the opening price, versus 5.4% a week earlier. Binance spot volume was 93,209 BTC, 8% less than the week before. The price fell four days in a row from Thursday through Sunday.
ETFs: $1.08B in over three days, $773M out over two. Spot bitcoin ETFs took in $526.6M on Oct. 19 and $528.4M on Oct. 21, then lost $635.5M on Oct. 22, the largest single-day outflow since June 25 according to The Block. Another $137.9M left on Friday on preliminary data, and the week ended near +$301M by Farside's count (crypto.news).
Nasdaq −2.6% in a day: the index closed at 26,009 on Oct. 22, its worst day since June (CNBC); Meta fell nearly 7% after earnings and the SOX semiconductor index dropped 6.7%. Bitcoin lost 3.2% that day and closed at $81,416 (our coverage).
More than $800M liquidated in a day: on Saturday, Oct. 24, $404M of longs were wiped out in four hours (The Block, citing CoinGlass), and more than $810M over 24 hours, about $689M of it longs (Bitcoin.com News). On Binance alone, $161.6M of longs and $80.3M of shorts were force-closed over the week.
Oil and the Fed: Brent settled at $116.72 on Friday, its highest close since April 29 and up 6.2% for the week (CNBC), on expectations of renewed U.S. strikes on Iran. The market heads into the Oct. 27⁠–⁠28 Fed meeting with Polymarket pricing a 94.5% chance of a hold. ETH fell 3.3% on the week, SOL 2.6%, while ZEC gained 7.3%; the Fear & Greed Index slid from 59 to 54, and to 50, "neutral," by Monday morning.

The week in numbers

CoinLab data only, no news recap.

Spot ETF flows


Net flow for the week	+$442.7M
Best day	Oct 21: +$528.4M
Worst day	Oct 22: −$635.5M
Total net assets	$104.7B
ETH ETFs for the week	−$225.0M
SOL ETFs for the week	−$17.3M

By fund and by day — on the ETF flows page.

Derivatives


Average Binance funding, per 8h	+0.0058% (+6.3% annualized)
Long liquidations (Binance)	$161.6M
Short liquidations (Binance)	$80.3M
Largest single liquidation	$12.0M

Liquidations come from the Binance feed and are a lower bound.

Sentiment and liquidity


Fear & Greed Index	59 → 54 (low 50, high 68)
Fed Net Liquidity	$5.80T, −71B over the week

Top-100 movers of the week

Gainers		Losers
M	+34.4%	STRK	−25.0%
STABLE	+10.4%	MORPHO	−16.9%
ENA	+9.8%	STX	−16.6%
PEPE	+9.1%	AERO	−16.2%
币安人生	+6.0%	SEI	−14.1%

Stablecoins excluded; 7-day change at publication time.

Data: Binance, SoSoValue, alternative.me, FRED, CoinMarketCap. Not investment advice.

The ETF flow in the table above is SoSoValue's Monday-to-Thursday balance at publication time; Friday's $137.9M outflow is not yet included. With Friday counted, the week ended near +$301M (Farside's count, see above).

Price and technicals

The first half of the week looked like the start of a reversal. Bitcoin opened Monday, Oct. 19, at $82,116 and barely moved (−0.2%), added 1.3% on Tuesday to $83,028, and on Wednesday afternoon ET, on ETF inflows and a short squeeze, reached $84,898, above last week's high of $84,352 and at the top of October's range. Wednesday's daily candle closed at $84,093, the best result in two weeks.

The reversal came from U.S. equities. Nasdaq 100 futures fell overnight after Tesla and Meta reported, and on Oct. 22 the selling spilled into crypto: bitcoin dropped 3.2% to $81,416 with a $80,940 low, a day CoinDesk described as bitcoin giving back its run at $85,000. The price held near $81,200 on Friday, then on Saturday morning ET thin weekend liquidity pushed it through $80,000: the weekly low of $79,221 was the lowest price in five weeks, per crypto.news. Sunday closed at $80,154, the fourth straight down day.

The technical picture as of Monday morning (our data on the bitcoin page and in the Market Pulse):

Price is below the 20-day EMA ($81,952) and the 50-day EMA ($80,805) but above the 200-day ($76,470). The 50/200 golden cross from Sept. 14 is intact; the 50-week moving average is $75,813.
Daily RSI(14) is 42, neutral with a downward tilt. The MACD histogram reads −358: weekly momentum is negative.
Bitcoin sits 36% below its all-time high of $126,080 (Oct. 6, 2025) and still 39% above this year's low of $57,800.
The $80,000⁠–⁠81,500 zone matters beyond the charts: by Glassnode's estimate, cited by Crypto Briefing, roughly $81,500 is the average entry price of spot ETF investors. The short-term holder cost basis is $74,682 (as of Oct. 19), 7% below the market.

Historical analogues of the current chart segment are in the fractals section. Our market temperature fell to 34 out of 100 over the week: neither overheating nor capitulation.

Derivatives and options

Leverage is slowly leaving the market. Open interest in Binance BTC/USDT perpetuals stood at 94,132 BTC ($7.55B) on Monday morning, down 3.5% on the week. Retail kept buying the dip: 68.5% of Binance accounts were long (a 2.17-to-1 ratio), top traders 1.63-to-1. Average Binance funding over the week was +0.0058% per 8 hours (6.3% annualized); it briefly turned negative on Oct. 21 during the run to $84,900 and returned to 0.006⁠–⁠0.008% by the weekend. Longs pay shorts a moderate premium, with no skew toward any single exchange.

Liquidations came in waves in both directions. The Oct. 21 rally hit shorts: $243M was liquidated market-wide in 24 hours, $188M of it short positions (The Block). Oct. 22 hit longs: $441M, including $397M of longs (The Block). Saturday, Oct. 24, was the week's main event: $404M of longs in four hours (The Block) and more than $810M over 24 hours across more than 200,000 traders (Bitcoin.com News). On the Binance feed that CoinLab tracks (a lower bound), $161.6M of longs and $80.3M of shorts were closed over the week, with the largest single liquidation at $12.0M (our liquidations page).

The options market took the drop calmly. DVOL, Deribit's implied volatility index, is at 38.2 versus 38.8 a week ago; the put/call ratio by open interest is 0.60, with 389,328 BTC ($31.2B) outstanding. The main event is ahead: on Friday, Oct. 30, at 4 AM ET, 135,840 BTC expire, about 35% of all Deribit open interest, with max pain at $78,000 and a put/call ratio of 0.55. The biggest strike in the series is the $95,000 call: by CryptoTicker's count as of Oct. 17 it held 25,570 contracts, and calls at $100,000 and above made up 13% of open positions. Those upside bets stay out of the money unless the price rises by a quarter in a week. The November skew is −4.6%: puts cost more than calls, and traders are paying for downside protection into the Fed.

Prediction markets see no edge either way. Polymarket's "BTC above X on Oct. 27" ladder puts the median at $80,275, right at Monday morning's price; for October targets, the market prices $82,500 at 54.5% and $77,500 at 43.5%.

ETFs and institutions

The ETF week split in two. On Monday, Oct. 19, spot bitcoin funds took in $526.6M, the best day since Sept. 22 (our coverage); BlackRock's IBIT absorbed 8,128 BTC that day, its largest intake in bitcoin terms since April 2025, while the other funds together shed 1,692 BTC (The Block). Tuesday brought a modest $23.2M, Wednesday $528.4M (our coverage): $1.08B in three days.

Thursday erased it: −$635.5M, with IBIT −$254.1M, FBTC −$217.5M and ARKB −$109.4M (our coverage). Another $137.9M left on Friday on preliminary data, and the week closed near +$301M (FinanceFeeds, citing Farside). Fund assets stand at $104.7B, 6.4% of bitcoin's market cap. The funds did not trade over the weekend, so their reaction to Saturday's drop to $79,221 will show only in Monday's figures.

Ether funds fared worse: −$225M for the week on SoSoValue data, and $1.08B of outflows since the start of October, with money leaving on 13 of 14 trading days (our coverage). Solana ETFs lost $17.3M.

Corporate buying slowed. Strategy bought just 267 BTC for $22.1M at an average $82,900 in the week of Oct. 12⁠–⁠18, bringing its holdings to 848,517 BTC at an average $75,446; the board raised the digital credit securities repurchase program from $2B to $3B (Form 8-K). The company usually reports the past week's purchases on Monday. In total, per CoinGecko, 181 public companies hold 1.30M BTC, 6.2% of the eventual supply.

Other institutional news of the week: Tesla and SpaceX set up committees to evaluate a merger that would combine 30,221 BTC (our coverage); Grayscale opened in-kind creations for 10 funds (our coverage); Standard Chartered agreed to buy custodian Zodia Custody (our coverage); JPMorgan penciled a 10% annual bitcoin return over 10⁠–⁠15 years into its long-term assumptions (our coverage) and brought tokenized money market funds to Solana (our coverage); Switzerland's FINMA approved the country's first retail bitcoin ETF (our coverage).

On-chain and mining

On-chain metrics sit mid-range. MVRV was 1.48 on Oct. 25 (38th percentile of history, Coin Metrics): the average holder is up 48%, far from overheated zones. Stablecoin supply is $304.2B, down 0.7% on the week and $2.5B over the month (DefiLlama): no fresh money is arriving. Ethereum staking hit a record 43.8M ETH, 35.9% of supply, per Bitwise (our coverage). Mt. Gox pushed its creditor repayment deadline to October 2027, moving the overhang of old coins out another year (our coverage).

Miners keep adding capacity despite the price. Hashrate per mempool.space was 1,084 EH/s on Monday morning; the seven-day average is back above 1 ZH/s and, by TheEnergyMag's count, at its highest since March 3, even as public companies convert sites to AI workloads. Difficulty is 140.58T after a 5.92% increase on Oct. 16; the next adjustment is due around Oct. 29, and the current block pace points to roughly another +6%. Fees are minimal at 1 sat/vB, with an empty mempool even on the sell-off day. Block height is 973,195, with 76,805 blocks to the April 2028 halving. In industry news, 15 mining companies including Bitmain and Canaan backed Tether's open-source MDK toolkit (our coverage), and Bitcoin Core developers will speed up fixes for "easily found" bugs because of AI (our coverage).

Macro

Three stories set the macro backdrop: AI earnings, oil and the Fed.

Equities. On Oct. 22 the Nasdaq fell 2.6% to 26,009, its worst day since June, and the S&P 500 dropped 1.2% to 7,663 (CNBC). Meta and Tesla earnings were the trigger: Meta fell nearly 7% despite strong revenue because AI spending spooked investors, and the SOX semiconductor index lost 6.7% (CoinCentral). On Friday the S&P 500 slipped another 0.5% to 7,624, a second straight losing week; the Nasdaq closed at 25,955. The same day China's CSI 300 entered a bear market, down 20% from its June peak (CoinDesk). Bitcoin's correlation with the Nasdaq was plain this week: both reversed on the same day.

Oil. Brent rose 3.1% on Oct. 23 to $116.72, its highest settlement since April 29, up 6.2% for the week in a third straight weekly gain; WTI settled at $103.27 (CNBC). Traders are pricing renewed U.S. strikes on Iran: per New York Times reporting cited by CNBC, plans are being drawn up for after the Nov. 3 congressional elections. On Sunday Trump said there would be no strike "today," and oil eased 1⁠–⁠2% by Monday morning (crypto.news). Gold did not benefit: $4,008 on Friday, down 4.1% for the week, with an intraday dip below $4,000.

Rates and the dollar. The 10-year Treasury yield fell 17 bp to 4.96% on Oct. 22 in a flight to quality and returned to 5.00% on Oct. 23; it ended the week down 9 bp, with the 2-year at 4.69% (−5 bp) (U.S. Treasury). The dollar index DXY is 101.7, down 0.3% on the week. The data gave the Fed no reason to soften: initial jobless claims came in at 194,000, the fewest in three months (CoinCentral), and the University of Michigan's one-year consumer inflation expectation is 4.7%.

The Fed. The policy rate is 3.75⁠–⁠4.00% after September's hike. The decision comes Oct. 28 at 2:00 PM ET, with Chair Kevin Warsh's press conference at 2:30 PM ET and no new projections at this meeting. In the Reuters poll cited by Newsquawk, 94 of 100 economists expect a hold; CME FedWatch puts it at 88% (Kiplinger), Polymarket at 94.5%. The real question is December: Polymarket prices a 25 bp hike on Dec. 8⁠–⁠9 at 76.5%, and PIMCO expects one as its base case.

Altcoins of the week

Altcoins had a worse week than bitcoin, but no crash. Ether opened at $2,410 and closed at $2,330 (−3.3%), ranging $2,282⁠–⁠2,527; with ETF outflows and a weak tech sector, it remains 53% below its August 2025 high (ETH page). Solana fell 2.6% to $101.40 but dipped to $98.62 during the week, below the round $100 mark; the Alpenglow upgrade cut finality to about 150 ms (The Block), and JPMorgan brought tokenized money market funds to the chain. XRP was little changed (−0.8%), and BNB gained 2.1% to $738.69.

The best performer in the top ten was Zcash: +7.3% to $1,214 ahead of the NU7 upgrade scheduled for early November (crypto.news). DeFi and infrastructure tokens fell hardest: AAVE −10.3%, MORPHO −16.9% per our catalog, and STRK extended its slide after October's rally (−25.0% over 7 days). Memecoins stayed green: MemeCore (M) +34.4%, PEPE +9.1%, along with ENA +9.8% (CoinLab data at publication time, see the block above).

Coin	Open Oct 19	Close Oct 25	Week
ETH	$2,410	$2,330	−3.3%
SOL	$104.11	$101.40	−2.6%
XRP	$1.307	$1.296	−0.8%
BNB	$723.36	$738.69	+2.1%
ZEC	$1,131	$1,214	+7.3%
HYPE	$78.97	$76.36	−3.3%
DOGE	$0.0795	$0.0769	−3.2%
LINK	$12.04	$11.46	−4.9%
ADA	$0.2212	$0.2042	−7.7%
AVAX	$9.78	$8.93	−8.7%

Binance daily candles, USDT pairs, Monday 00:00 UTC to Sunday 24:00 UTC.

Regulation and events

U.S. regulators are acting without a market structure law. The SEC closed comments on "Regulation Crypto Assets" on Oct. 20 after receiving about 140 submissions (Cointelegraph); Ripple backed the proposal, while overnight into Monday California came out against it, saying the rule strips states of oversight (our coverage). The SEC also added tokenization to its fiscal 2027 exam priorities (our coverage). The OCC became the first regulator to finalize rules under the GENIUS Act on stablecoins (our coverage). Senator Richard Blumenthal asked Tether for records of payments to a firm founded by former White House adviser Bo Hines (our coverage).

In Europe and Asia: the UK's FCA opened consultations on DeFi rules and the crypto regulatory perimeter, with comments due by Nov. 18 (our coverage); Coinbase Ireland was fined €3.25M over client asset safeguarding (our coverage); Bybit received a VARA license in Dubai (our coverage); a court in Kazakhstan's AIFC restricted Coinbase, BingX and four other exchanges (our coverage). HTX added Russia to its list of prohibited jurisdictions and MEXC is ending service for users in Russia and Belarus (our coverage, and here), continuing the retreat of Asian exchanges from sanctioned markets. An Argentine court dismissed the LIBRA case, clearing President Javier Milei and 10 others (our coverage).

Security: the Initia network was halted after a mint exploit that cashed out about $2.6M (our coverage); the Drift exploiter sent $109M to Tornado Cash in two days (our coverage); Electrum patched a flaw that let rogue servers redirect payments (our coverage); Interpol reported recovering $105M and shutting illegal mining centers in Africa (our coverage). In DeFi, Aerodrome and Velodrome merged into the Aero DEX across seven chains (our coverage).

Calendar for the week ahead

Times are ET.

Monday, Oct. 26: the ETF reaction to Saturday's drop (data lands overnight into Tuesday); Strategy's usual Monday purchase report; China's Fifth Plenum opens (Oct. 26⁠–⁠29).
Tuesday, Oct. 27: day one of the Fed meeting; Israel's Knesset election; 8:30 AM U.S. durable goods, 10 AM Conference Board consumer confidence; Strategy's shareholder vote on STRC dividends closes.
Wednesday, Oct. 28: Fed decision at 2:00 PM, Kevin Warsh's press conference at 2:30 PM; Bank of Canada and RBNZ decisions (markets expect 25 bp hikes), the UK Autumn Budget; Strategy's special shareholder meeting; Microsoft and Alphabet are expected to report after the close per earnings calendars (the companies have not confirmed the dates); Amazon also reports this week (CoinCentral).
Thursday, Oct. 29: 8:30 AM advance Q3 U.S. GDP (consensus 3.0%, GDPNow 3.5%) and September PCE (expected 3.6% y/y, core 3.1%) (Newsquawk); ECB decision; bitcoin difficulty adjustment (about +6%); Strategy's quarterly results after the close (Strategy).
Friday, Oct. 30: 4:00 AM Deribit monthly expiry: 135,840 BTC, max pain $78,000; Bank of Japan decision; eurozone GDP and inflation.
Further out: Oct. 31, Bitget plans to close its purchase of a Thai exchange; Nov. 3, U.S. congressional elections; early November, Zcash NU7 upgrade; Nov. 10, Binance Pool shutdown; Nov. 11, MSCI index decision; Nov. 18, FCA consultations close.

Outlook

The week mapped the range. The ceiling is $84,900, where the market has now turned back twice without ETF support and with a weak Nasdaq; the floor is $79,200⁠–⁠80,000, where buyers showed up on Saturday as soon as longs were flushed. Three days of $1.08B in ETF inflows could not hold the price once equities reversed: correlation with the tech sector is again the main driver, while oil at $116 and inflation expectations keep the Fed from softening its tone.

The base case for the week is a range between $78,000 and $83,000 with elevated volatility on Wednesday afternoon and Friday morning. The Oct. 28 Fed decision is almost certainly a hold, and the market's reaction hinges on the signal about December; GDP and PCE follow the next day, and on Oct. 30 a third of the options market expires with max pain at $78,000, below the current price. Support rests on the ETF average entry near $81,500 and the short-term holder cost basis of $74,700; resistance is the 20-day average near $82,000 and the weekly high. Earnings from Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon will show whether the AI-sector sell-off continues, since it was the main reason bitcoin fell this week.

This is not investment advice.