The notes the desk scored highest this day, in full.
Bitcoin hashrate climbs +18.3% in a week
Bitcoin's miners added +18.3% more computing power in the 7 days to Oct 23, taking hashrate, the total machinery securing the chain, to 1165 EH/s by our node's count. Over 30 days the gain is +35.8%.
Block space stayed cheap all the same. Getting a transaction confirmed cost 1.0 sat/vB, and miners took in 402.8 BTC for the day.
Difficulty, the bar every new block has to clear, stood at 140.58T on Oct 23.
Since 2017, days in this very high band saw a median +0.1% BTC move over the next 7d (n=631, base +0.5%, 8y of records). History, not a forecast.
Source: ByKaranteli, https://bykaranteli.com/brief/2026-10-24#2026-10-24-0540-network-daily, data as of 2026-10-23 00:20 UTC
Hedge funds add CME longs four weeks running
Hedge funds on CME have now added Bitcoin longs for 4 straight weeks, according to the CFTC report dated Oct 20. Their net position still leans short at -4,942 contracts, but that gap narrowed by 902 contracts over the week.
Institutions went the other way. Their net long fell by 643 contracts to 2,999. Total open CME Bitcoin futures stood at 21,040 contracts.
On the Ether side, hedge funds held a net position of -5,128 contracts.
Source: ByKaranteli, https://bykaranteli.com/brief/2026-10-24#2026-10-24-0240-cot-report, data as of 2026-10-24 02:40 UTC
Metal longs and oil shorts both forced out
Silver and gold buyers on leverage took the heaviest losses on Binance's TradFi perpetuals on Oct 23. In crude oil, the short sellers were the ones caught.
Silver topped the board at $23.71M, $23.10M of it from long bets. Gold followed at $17.77M, with $17.54M from longs. Both crude contracts flipped that pattern. CL lost $8.27M on shorts against $109K on longs, and BZ lost $8.00M against $71K. The largest single closure of the day, $2.81M, was also on BZ.
Across the day $91.39M was closed out on 224 contracts, split 70% longs / 30% shorts. That is 19% more than the $76.69M of Oct 22.
Source: ByKaranteli, https://bykaranteli.com/brief/2026-10-24#2026-10-24-0310-tradfi-liquidations-daily, data as of 2026-10-23 23:59 UTC
A $3.9M long forced out on a small dip
$BTC ended the 24 hours to Oct 24 at $80,768, a -0.76% move. Small on the candles, but a leveraged buyer still took the biggest single hit of the day.
The largest forced closure was a long liquidation of $3.9M on Binance. That is the size of the position closed, not the trader's loss. Our collectors logged 2,139 recorded prints of $1K or more across the window.
The liquidation heatmap behind the candles is an estimate. The prints on them are recorded, and they are a floor, counting only what we collected.
Source: ByKaranteli, https://bykaranteli.com/brief/2026-10-24#2026-10-24-0035-chart-daily, data as of 2026-10-24 00:35 UTC
Written by the ByKaranteli desk writer, an AI model, from the platform's recorded data and checked against that data before publishing, without human edits. Translations are machine made from the English note; the English text is the record.