Crypto market brief · 2026-10-13

Solana order flow turns lopsided

Solana's order flow entered its most lopsided tenth today. Our VPIN gauge for $SOL, which tracks how much trading volume piles onto the buy or the sell side at once, reads 0.1348. That is higher than 90% of the readings in our records.

Ether is the more extreme case. $ETH flow stands at its 99th percentile, near the top of everything we have logged for it.

VPIN is a read on imbalance only. It tells you volume is heavily one sided, not whether buyers or sellers are doing the pushing.

Source: ByKaranteli, https://bykaranteli.com/brief/2026-10-13#2026-10-13-1205-vpin-alert, data as of 2026-10-13 12:05 UTC

Ether's order flow turns one sided

Trading in Ether has turned unusually lopsided. The VPIN gauge for $ETH tracks how much volume stacks up on the buy or sell side at once. It reads 0.1606, higher than 98% of the readings in our records.

Bitcoin is not far behind, with $BTC flow at its 93rd percentile.

VPIN measures how one sided the flow is, not its direction. A high reading means one side is hitting the market hard. It does not say which side.

Source: ByKaranteli, https://bykaranteli.com/brief/2026-10-13#2026-10-13-0605-vpin-alert, data as of 2026-10-13 06:05 UTC

OKX reopens Ether withdrawals on Starknet

OKX has reopened Ether withdrawals on the ETH STARKNET network, about an hour after closing them. The change shows up in the venue's own currency list, which we read daily.

For $ETH holders at OKX who send funds out through Starknet, a layer two network built on Ethereum, that route works again. The pause lasted about 1 hour, a short gap for anyone who had a transfer waiting.

Source: ByKaranteli, https://bykaranteli.com/brief/2026-10-13#2026-10-13-0137-event-venue-event, data as of 2026-10-13 01:37 UTC

Solana longs lose $9.3M in 30 minutes

Leveraged Solana buyers just took a hit in a 30 minute burst. Exchanges forcibly closed $9.3M of $SOL long positions, bets that the price would go up, counted from the raw liquidation streams of the major venues.

Traders positioned for a drop came through almost untouched, with $74.5K liquidated on their side over the same window.

The pain landed on one side. It hit the traders who borrowed to bet on a rise.

Source: ByKaranteli, https://bykaranteli.com/brief/2026-10-13#2026-10-13-0107-event-liq-burst, data as of 2026-10-13 01:07 UTC

Bitcoin longs take a $5.8M flush

Leveraged Bitcoin buyers just took a hit. In the last 30 minutes, exchanges forcibly closed $5.8M of long positions in $BTC, bets that the price would go up, across the major venues.

The short side, positions betting on a fall, saw just $237.7K liquidated in the same window.

Nearly all of the forced closing landed on one group, the traders who had borrowed to bet on a rise.

Source: ByKaranteli, https://bykaranteli.com/brief/2026-10-13#2026-10-13-0037-event-liq-burst, data as of 2026-10-13 00:37 UTC

OKX shuts Ether withdrawals on Starknet

OKX has shut Ether withdrawals on the ETH STARKNET network, as recorded from the venue's own currency list in our daily read.

The pressure falls on $ETH holders at OKX who move funds out through Starknet, a layer two network built on Ethereum. That route is closed until the venue reopens it. Deposits and withdrawals over other networks may still be open.

A withdrawal pause is the earliest public sign a venue gives when something is wrong, and most of them turn out to be routine maintenance.

Source: ByKaranteli, https://bykaranteli.com/brief/2026-10-13#2026-10-13-0037-event-venue-event, data as of 2026-10-13 00:37 UTC

Leveraged Ether longs lose $23.8M in a flush

The exchanges just cleared out a wave of leveraged Ether buyers. In the last 30 minutes, $23.8M of long positions in $ETH, bets that the price would go up, were forcibly closed across the major venues.

The other side barely felt it. Short liquidations, positions betting on a fall, came to $184.6K over the same window, measured from the raw liquidation streams of the major exchanges.

This flush hit traders who were leaning on a higher Ether price with borrowed money.

Source: ByKaranteli, https://bykaranteli.com/brief/2026-10-13#2026-10-13-0007-event-liq-burst, data as of 2026-10-13 00:07 UTC

Bitcoin order flow turns lopsided

Bitcoin's order flow has turned unusually one sided. Our flow toxicity gauge for $BTC reads 0.1685, higher than 91% of the readings in our records, which puts it in the top tenth.

The gauge is VPIN, a measure of how much trading volume piles up on the buy or sell side at once instead of balancing out. A high reading means one side is pushing harder than normal.

It measures imbalance only. It carries no information about whether that pressure comes from buyers or sellers.

Source: ByKaranteli, https://bykaranteli.com/brief/2026-10-13#2026-10-13-0005-vpin-alert, data as of 2026-10-13 00:05 UTC

Bitcoin's biggest forced exit hit a long

Bitcoin gave up -2.79% over the 24 hours to Oct 13, with $BTC last trading at $81,388.

The single largest forced closure in that window was a long liquidation of $9.7M on Binance, a position betting on a rise that the exchange closed out. Our collectors logged 2,799 recorded prints of $1K or more across the day.

The heatmap behind the candles is an estimate of where leveraged positions sit; the prints on the candles are recorded liquidations.

TradFi perp longs took 91% of liquidations

Traders betting on a rise carried almost all the damage across Binance's TradFi perpetuals on Oct 12. Of $49.85M in positions force closed, $45.6M were longs and $4.3M shorts, a 91% longs / 9% shorts split across 209 contracts and 9,550 events.

SNDK led the day with $14.26M liquidated, $13.65M of it long. KORU followed at $5.29M and also took the largest single forced closure, $1.26M. SOXL came third at $4.35M.

On Oct 11 the total across these stock, commodity and index perps was $1.16M, which puts Oct 12 at +4187% against the day before.

Bitcoin hashrate fell hard over the week

The computing power securing Bitcoin read 956 EH/s on Oct 12, a -19.0% change over 7 days. Over 30 days the change was only -0.5%, so the weekly drop sits inside a month that ended close to where it started.

Mining difficulty, the network setting for how hard it is to find a block, stood at 132.72T the same day.

Sending a $BTC transaction cost very little, with fees at 1.0 sat/vB. Miners took in 477.9 BTC in revenue on the day.

Binance charges the most to borrow dollars

Binance was the priciest place to borrow USDT for margin trading in the read taken at 05:25 UTC on Oct 13, charging 4.71% a year. OKX was the cheapest at 3.5%, and Bybit matched the median of 3.92% across the three venues.

On OKX, traders long BNB perpetuals were paying the other side at a rate of 10.95% a year. Borrowing BNB on that venue cost 1%. That recorded gap of 9.95% was the widest among the 15 assets we track, a figure for the day rather than a standing rate.

Order flow is leaning hard to one side

Order flow is leaning hard to one side. VPIN, our flow toxicity gauge that scores how lopsided buying and selling volume is, reads 0.1743. That is higher than 94% of the last 90 days.

The gauge sorts trades into buckets of equal volume and measures how much of each bucket lands on the buy side versus the sell side. A reading this high means trades have been arriving in one direction more heavily than on most days of the past 90.

It measures how uneven the flow is, not which way it points. Heavy one sided volume can come from eager buyers or from eager sellers, and this reading doesn't separate the two.

Bitcoin call buyers edged out put buyers

Bitcoin option buyers leaned slightly toward the upside over the past 24 hours. They paid $4.7M in premium for calls, which gain if price rises, against $4.3M for puts, which pay if it falls.

Negotiated deals carried real weight. Of all premium dollars recorded across 18,296 trades, 40% went through as block trades, arranged off the order book and then reported to the venue.

The largest single trade of the past 48 hours was a $671.8K block sale of $86,000 calls expiring Dec 25. Next came a $567.5K buy of $65,000 calls for Oct 30 and a $565.1K sale of $74,000 puts for Mar 26, 2027.

US buyers stay under global price, day 38

A 38th straight day of Americans bidding Bitcoin below the global price. The Coinbase premium, the gap between the US price and everyone else, reads -0.13% on Oct 13, with $BTC at $83,555 and up 0.10% over 24 hours.

The Fear and Greed index reads 57, in greed, and Bitcoin holds 59.77% of a $2.8T total market.

Underneath, Bitcoin order flow is lopsided. The toxicity gauge, which measures how one sided buying and selling are, reads 0.17, its 90th percentile of 90 days. The heaviest unwind hit $DOGE, where open interest fell 12.1% as price dropped 3.3%, squeezing longs. Across 10 large coins, 5 are shedding leverage and 2 are adding it.

Bybit's insurance fund dipped -0.48%

Bybit's insurance fund moved -0.48% in the 24 hours to Oct 13, the biggest move among the 10 venues we cover. It holds $1.17B, the cash Bybit keeps to pay for liquidations that close below the bankruptcy price.

Across all 10 venues the funds total $7.69B, a -0.10% change on the day, or -$7.5M, and -1.08% over 7 days. OKX holds the largest at $3.04B, with Binance next at $2.43B.

Together the funds equal 16.35% of the money in open perpetual futures positions on the coins we track. These are balances the venues report, not audits.

Deribit settles Bitcoin and Ether futures Oct 14

Deribit has 12 dated $BTC futures and 12 dated $ETH futures expiring on Oct 14, along with one contract each in $SOL, Avalanche and Hype. All of them are delivery contracts.

Dated futures carry a fixed end date, so positions in them close out on that day instead of rolling on like perpetuals. Bullish also has one Bitcoin delivery contract ending Oct 14, the nearest expiry on the list.

Across the 7 days from Oct 12, 107 dated futures contracts expire on 11 venues, and 6,560 option contracts also run out. No dated futures settlement was recorded in the 24 hours to Oct 12.

Stablecoin supply shrank on the week

Dollars held in stablecoins shrank by $0.9B in the week to Oct 12, leaving $311.30B. That's the cash traders use to move in and out of crypto, and over 30 days it's still $1.1B larger.

On the macro side, the Fed funds rate was recorded at 3.88% and the US 10 year Treasury yield at 5.22%. The Fed's balance sheet stood at $6.75T on that date.

The reverse repo, the Fed facility where money funds park spare cash overnight, held just $300.0M, close to empty.

Asks outweigh bids in the Bitcoin spot book

Across 21 spot venues, the $BTC book held far more selling interest than buying near the price on Oct 13. Within 2% of the $83.5K mid, resting asks came to $180.6M against $129.2M in bids, a -16.6% imbalance weighing on the bid side.

The two biggest walls sat almost on top of the price. The largest bid was at $83.4K, 0.05% below mid, with $37.2M behind it. The largest ask was at $83.5K, 0.05% above, holding $42.0M.

Compared with 24 hours earlier, bids within that range are 10.5% thinner and asks 4% deeper, with the mid up 0.1%. Resting orders can be pulled at any moment, so treat this as a snapshot of the book at 09:37 UTC, not a map of what comes next.

Big orders split nearly evenly on both sides

Neither camp ran the large money in the 24 hours to 10:00 UTC on Oct 13. Across 11,403 big trades, sellers moved $10.61B and buyers $10.02B, giving buyers 48.6% of the flow.

That sits inside the 45% to 55% range we treat as two sided, with sellers holding a slight edge.

Bitcoin drew the most size, ahead of Ether and Solana, and also hosted the single largest trade of the window at $37.7M.

Short bets crowd the levels above Bitcoin

Traders betting on a Bitcoin drop hold more of the modeled liquidation exposure within 3% of the $83,300 price on Oct 13. The estimated map tilts upward, with more of it stacked above the price than below.

Above, the nearest modeled short liquidations sit at $84,109, and the largest cluster is at $85,664. Short sellers caught there would be forced to buy back.

The long side starts very close. Estimated long liquidations begin at $83,040, with the biggest cluster further down at $80,611.

Dogecoin traders cut 13.19% of futures bets

Leverage came out of the large coins in the 24 hours to Oct 13, 11:35 UTC, and Dogecoin led the exit. Open interest in $DOGE, the value of futures bets still open, moved -13.19% with price at -4.16%.

Cardano came next at -11.25% with $ADA at -7.03%, then Avalanche at -8.88% and Chainlink at -8.41%. Ether and BNB shed smaller amounts. Litecoin was the one coin tagged as shorts building, with price at -6.04%.

Funding, the fee one side pays the other to keep a position open, read near 0% across the list, so these positions closed without either side paying up to stay in.

Bybit carries all three new perpetual contracts

Every new perpetual contract (a future with no expiry date) first seen in the 24 hours to 12:30 UTC on Oct 13 traded on Bybit. Three symbols made the list, all settled against USDT.

SNPS and ZCSH were first seen together at 04:52 UTC, on both Bybit and HTX. GRAL followed at 08:52 UTC and appeared on Bybit only.

That makes HTX the only other venue to carry any of the day's new contracts, with two of the three.

Open bets on Solana perps venues shrink

Traders on Solana's perpetual futures venues pulled leverage back over the 24 hours to 11:00 UTC on Oct 13. Open interest, the value of positions still open, fell -10.03% across the five venues we track, from $144.72M to $130.20M.

Jupiter Perps was the biggest mover. Open positions there dropped by -$8.23M to $40.80M. As of that hour the venue held 31.3% of the total, a share shift of -2.5 pts.

The drop measures how much leverage left. It does not show which side of the market closed.

Ether trades below yesterday's busiest range

Ether is trading under the range where it spent most of yesterday's session. At 12:44 UTC, ahead of the US open, $ETH stood at $2,498.07, below the bottom of the Oct 12 value area at $2,510.30.

On Oct 12, 70% of trading time in Ether perpetuals sat between $2,510.30 and $2,564.82, with the most traded price at $2,541.37. The session closed at $2,445.84, -3.76% against that price.

Bitcoin is still inside its own range. $BTC traded at $83,188.40 against an Oct 12 value area of $81,713.75 to $83,681.24, where the most traded price was $82,655.63.

Ether long risk stacks up below price

The heavier side of the estimated Ether liquidation map sits below price on Oct 13. With $ETH at $2,504, more modeled exposure within 3% of price belongs to long positions, the traders who get closed out on a drop.

The first estimated long levels start at $2,489, with the largest cluster further down at $2,419. Above price, short sellers would be forced to buy back from $2,513, and their largest estimated cluster sits at $2,545.

These levels are modeled from open interest and leverage, not recorded liquidations.

xStocks lists 1,260 new stock wrappers

xStocks accounted for 1,260 of the 1,266 new tokenized stock wrappers recorded on Oct 13. Coinbase Tokenized Stocks added 5 and Backpack Securities added 1. Every entry comes from the issuers' own lists.

Across all issuers, Solana took the most with 127. Arbitrum, BNB Chain, Ethereum, HyperEVM, Ink, Mantle, Optimism, TON and X Layer each got 126, and Base got 5.

One example is $AEO, which appeared as AEOx from xStocks on Arbitrum, BNB Chain, Ethereum, HyperEVM, Ink and Mantle. A trader looking at one of these tokens can check which issuer stands behind it and which chain it lives on.

Offers outweigh bids in Bitcoin and Ether books

Resting offers outweighed bids in both Bitcoin and Ether order books across 21 spot venues at 13:58 UTC on Oct 13, and the gap was wider in Ether.

Within 2% of the price, $ETH carried $77.2M of bids against $111.3M of asks, an imbalance of -18.1%. $BTC showed $133.4M of bids against $177.2M of asks, at -14.1%.

The largest single blocks sat right next to the price. In Bitcoin, $28.8M of bids rested at $83,225 and $32.2M of asks at $83,308. In Ether, the $15.0M bid wall at $2,501 slightly outsized the $13.9M ask wall at $2,509.

These are resting orders, not trades, and they can be pulled before price reaches them.

Cardano carries the thinnest book of eight

On Oct 13 the costliest of the eight order books we track to trade at size was Cardano. Our estimate puts slippage on a $1.0M market order in $ADA at 22.8 bps. The same order in $BTC comes to an estimated 0.5 bps.

Chainlink sat right behind at 22.6 bps, with Dogecoin at 11.6 bps and BNB at 8.3 bps. On the deep side, Ether came in at 1.4 bps, Solana at 3.2 bps and XRP at 5.1 bps.

Thin books matter most when positions get forced shut. On Cardano and Chainlink, the same dollar amount of liquidations meets far less resting depth than on Bitcoin, whichever side is being closed.

Shorts in RSR pay the board's steepest fee

Traders betting against $RSR were paying the steepest price on our pressure board in the Oct 13 snapshot at 15:00 UTC. Funding stood at -0.52%, meaning shorts paid longs that much to keep their bets open, even as open interest, the total of open futures positions, shrank 5.34% over 24 hours.

A steep fee with no new positions arriving is positioning without fresh money. The board scored it 62, top of the list.

Most of the rest is positions closing with funding near flat. Open interest fell 27.18% in DOS, 19.67% in BTW and 13.29% in W. $S stands apart, with open interest up 42.33% and funding at 0%.

Lira buyers pay a little under the world

Bitcoin bought with lira came in a little cheaper than the global dollar price on Oct 13. At the official USD/TRY rate, $BTC traded at -0.13%, or -12.9 bps, against the world. Our score reads 45 / 100, a neutral regime.

The gap sits in the dollar, not in Bitcoin. Tether on Turkish exchanges traded -12.1 bps under the official lira rate. The Bitcoin price itself was only -0.9 bps off.

No venue paid above the world. Bitlo was the dearest at -3.7 bps and CoinTR the cheapest at -15.6 bps. The 24 hour average was -9.8 bps against +1.0 bps over 7 days. This is a price gap, not a trade anyone can execute.

Ether's bid side thinned 28.7% in a day

Ether's spot book lost depth on the bid side in the 24 hours to 15:38 UTC on Oct 13. Resting bids within 2% of the price are 28.7% thinner than a day earlier, and asks are 4.7% deeper.

Across 21 spot venues, $88.12M of bids sit within 2% of the $2,514.97 mid against $91.26M of asks. That is a -1.8% imbalance, leaving the ask side slightly heavier.

The two largest walls mirror each other 0.15% from the price, with $17.19M of bids at $2,511.20 and $17.37M of asks at $2,518.74. Resting orders can be pulled at any moment, so this is a snapshot of the book, not a map of where price goes.

Sellers stretch 41 perps into oversold

Selling has stretched more Binance perps to the downside than the upside. On Oct 13, 41 of 398 crypto perps read oversold on the daily RSI, a 14 day gauge of how one sided recent moves have been, where 30 or under counts as oversold and 70 or over as overbought. 26 sat at the overbought end.

1000RATS is the deepest at 16.3. ARC follows at 20.6 after a -51.6% day, then APR at 22.5 with a -28.0% move over 24 hours.

On the hot side, BAT leads at 86.5 after gaining +23.9%. Across the whole universe the average daily reading is 46.9, close to the middle of the range.

Ether traders crowd the long side on Binance

Ether has the most lopsided crowd among the 30 large coins we track. On Binance, 2.58 accounts held $ETH longs for every short as of 16:50 UTC on Oct 13.

Bitcoin leans long more mildly. Binance accounts stood at 1.24 longs per short, and the biggest traders, measured by position size, held 1.57 to 1. On Bybit 59.7% of accounts were long, and OKX showed 1.27 to 1.

Order flow pulled the other way. Over the 24 hours, $BTC sellers hitting bids outweighed buyers lifting offers, leaving a net -231 BTC. In the last hour, aggressive buys ran at 0.9 for every aggressive sell.

Alts lead Bitcoin but fall short of altseason

Most altcoins still hold a lead over Bitcoin across the last 90 days, but not a wide enough one to count as altseason. The Altcoin Season Index reads 71 on Oct 13, under the 75 line, which puts it in no clear season.

34 of the 48 alts we sample beat $BTC over 90 days, against a Bitcoin gain of 29.1% in the same stretch. The index is 3 points lower than seven days ago.

BTW leads the field at 31x. At the bottom, US is down -75.7%, and Stellar's +2.0% left $XLM far behind Bitcoin.

Trader mood drops 12 points in a day

A 12 point drop in one day took some heat out of trader mood. The Fear and Greed index, a gauge of how optimistic crypto traders feel, read 57 at 19:00 UTC on Oct 13. That's still inside Greed, but well below the prior day's reading.

Cash on the sidelines kept growing anyway. Stablecoin supply, the dollar tokens parked on chain and ready to trade, reached $313.10B, up 0.22% over the same 24 hours.

Bitcoin accounts for 59.19% of the total crypto market's value.

Bitcoin holds 59.2% of crypto's value

A $2.82T crypto market, and Bitcoin accounts for 59.2% of it as of 19:42 UTC on Oct 13. That share is called dominance, one coin's slice of total crypto market value.

Ether is the next largest at 10.85%. Every other token, from large caps down to the smallest listings, splits whatever is left.

Today's read is a level, not a direction. It shows where the money sits on Oct 13, not which way it is moving between $BTC, $ETH and the rest of the market.

Every theme fell, Layer 2 hit hardest

No theme basket escaped the selling in the 24 hours to Oct 13. Layer 2 took the deepest hit at -10.43%, with DeFi at -8.73% and AI at -7.77% behind it. RWA held up best at -0.59%.

The month still looks very different. Seven of our eight themes are ahead of Bitcoin's 5.9% over 30 days. Quantum leads at 68.1%, 62.2 points clear of $BTC, and Layer 2 still shows 46.8% for the month even after the worst day on the board.

Meme is the only theme trailing Bitcoin over 30 days, 1.6 points behind with a 4.3% gain.

Tokenized stocks track their shares closely

Across 200 tokenized stocks, the median wrapper traded -0.05% from the real share on Oct 13, close to parity. Each token tracks one listed share held by a custodian and trades onchain around the clock.

The widest premium was BMNRon Ethereum +2.36%, followed by GMEB BNB Chain +1.86%. The deepest discount was PLTRx Solana -1.17%. GameStop carried the widest gap of any single stock, at 2.75 pp.

Supply onchain came to $3.44B at the share price, +1.24% since the last recorded day. DEX volume reached $299.3M, +11.06% on the prior day, and Ondo Stocks remains the largest issuer with $1.03B.

Longs took most of $540.1M in liquidations

Of $540.1M liquidated in the 24 hours to Oct 13, $427.6M came from leveraged longs forced out of their positions, against $112.5M of shorts, across 128,191 events. $ETH led at $128.8M, and the largest single liquidation was $9.7M on $BTC.

Open interest in perpetual futures across 27 venues stands at $73.08B, -0.95% against 24 hours earlier, with 15.16% of it held on decentralized venues.

US spot ETFs posted net outflows on Oct 12, -$65.4M for Bitcoin and -$85.4M for Ether. Among the largest Hyperliquid accounts by equity, the 282 with open positions hold 43.7% of their notional long.

The biggest resting Bitcoin bid wall is $86.9M at $82.8K, 0.65% below mid.

Solana longs carry Jupiter's open bets

Solana bettors carry most of the weight on Jupiter, the Solana based perps venue. Of the $66.7M in long positions open across SOL, ETH and BTC on Oct 13, $46.7M sit on $SOL, against $11.0M in SOL shorts.

Shorts total $18.4M across all three markets, which leaves longs with a 78.4% share. Bitcoin longs come next at $15.9M, and Ether longs trail at $4.2M.

The liquidity pool that takes the other side of these trades holds $886.4M and pays its providers an 8% annual rate. Its short side is the tighter one. 65.4% of short capacity is in use in every market, against 10.83% on the SOL long side.

GM Trade leads with a near even book

GM Trade carried 44.0% of all open positions on Solana's perpetual venues on Oct 13, $104.7M of a $238.2M board, and its book was close to evenly split. Shorts summed to $105.6M against $103.9M of longs, and the median hourly funding rate, the fee one side pays the other, was +0.0002%.

Jupiter Perps looked different. Longs there totaled $66.7M against $18.4M of shorts, and its $SOL market was the single largest on the board at $28.9M.

Across six venues and 279 markets, traders turned over $1.40B in the 24 hours to Oct 13.