No. 4Saturday, 24 October 20266 min read

Upbit traded $1.17bn of five tokens worth $288m between them

Irys alone did 633 times its normal daily volume, and 74.37m of its tokens unlock on 25 Oct.

BTC $80,500 -1.5%ETH $2,363 -1.6%SOL $101.38 -2.8%XRP $1.28 -3.4%

Good morning. Bitcoin is $80,500, down 1.5% and 1.6% below its 50-day average of $81,802. No major moved more than 3.4%. The day belongs to five micro-caps that traded $2.20bn between them on $288m of combined market value, and to the one exchange that handled over half of it.

The tape

24-hour change: ORDER +163.1%, BIRB +112.6%, IRYS +72.3%, BMT +60.6%, BTC -1.5%, ETH -1.6%, BNB -2.1%, SOL -2.8%, XRP -3.4%, WLD -13.5% — Four micro-caps tripled while no major moved more than 3.4%. As of 10:21 UTC, 24 Oct 2026.

Bitcoin (BTC) $80,500, -1.5% on the day and -3.7% over 30 days. Ether (ETH) $2,363, -1.6% and -11.3%. Solana (SOL) $101.38, -2.8% and -11.1%. XRP $1.28, -3.4% and -13.9%. The market is $2.69tn, -4.1% in 24 hours; bitcoin's share 60.1%.

Gainers: Orderly (ORDER), a shared order book several exchanges trade against, +163.1%; Moonbirds (BIRB), a Solana token airdropped by the NFT collection, +112.6%; Irys (IRYS), a layer-1 blockchain that stores data and runs contracts on it, +72.3%; Bubblemaps (BMT), which maps token holders visually, +60.6%. Losers: Worldcoin (WLD), the iris-scanning identity network, -13.5%; Pepe (PEPE) -13.0%; Polkadot (DOT) -10.5%; NEAR Protocol (NEAR) -9.0%.

Where to look

Six things today, in order: fund flows turned negative, stablecoin float still shrinking, alt funding flipped negative, nine sectors of eleven red, the Fed on Wednesday, on-chain dollars below bills.

Seven-day sector performance: Memes +1.0%, Privacy +0.4%, Exchange tokens -0.7%, Layer 1 -1.6%, Liquid staking -2.9%, RWA -3.8%, DeFi -5.1%, DEX -5.9%, AI -7.7%, Lending -7.8%, Layer 2 -8.0% — Only memes and privacy rose; layer-2, lending and AI fell hardest. Cap-weighted top 50 per sector. As of 10:19 UTC, 24 Oct 2026.

01
Spot bitcoin funds sold $635.5m on 22 Oct and a preliminary $137.9m on 23 Oct.
BlackRock's IBIT lost $254.1m, Fidelity's FBTC $217.5m and ARK's ARKB $109.4m, five of twelve in outflow. They still netted $360.3m over the five sessions to 22 Oct while bitcoin fell from $81,269 to $80,500.
WatchA third outflow session with bitcoin below $81,802.
02
The stablecoin float is $298.71bn, down $1.22bn on the week.
USD Coin (USDC) lost $921m on the week and $3.62bn over 30 days, to $71.81bn; Tether (USDT) lost $1.03bn, to $182.45bn. Bitcoin on exchanges is $217.4bn against $227.1bn a month ago, though $506m moved on 23 Oct.
WatchUSDC below $71.0bn.
03
Perpetual funding has gone negative across the alts: Worldcoin -33.6% annualised, NEAR -28.9%, Zcash (ZEC) -28.0%, Solana -10.1%, Ether -3.8%, against bitcoin at +11.0%.
On Hyperliquid, the derivatives venue, shorts pay longs on $513m of Zcash open interest and $291m of NEAR. Retail went the other way: OKX's long/short ratio is 2.12 on bitcoin against 1.83 a week ago, 3.04 on Solana, 4.82 on Dogecoin (DOGE).
WatchZcash funding above zero.
04
Nine of eleven sectors fell on the week: artificial intelligence -7.68%, lending -7.82%, layer-2 -8.02%.

The deep dive

Five tokens traded $2.20bn in 24 hours against $288m of combined market value, and Upbit, South Korea's largest exchange, handled $1.17bn of it: four times what the five are worth. We scanned the top 1,000 tokens for any trading more than its own market capitalisation in a day, then split that volume by venue.

Share of 24-hour volume by venue: Upbit is 62.0% of Moonbirds, 49.9% of Irys, 36.6% of Bubblemaps, 65.9% of Orderly and 48.3% of DAPPOS — Upbit is the largest single venue for four of the five. As of 10:17 UTC, 24 Oct 2026.

Moonbirds turned over 13.50 times its market value, Irys 8.19, Bubblemaps 7.79, Orderly 4.54 and DAPPOS (DOS), an artificial-intelligence services token, 3.02. The median token worth more than $50m turns over 3.2% of itself a day: Moonbirds ran 418 times that, DAPPOS 94 times. With Bithumb and Coinone, Korean venues are 62.8% of the volume.

Irys's median daily volume over the 27 days to 21 Oct was $1.69m; on Friday it did $1.07bn, 633 times that. The price ran from $0.0117 on 18 Oct to $0.295913 at 19:24 UTC on 23 Oct, 25.2 times in five days, and is $0.0649 now, 78.1% below. About $21.4m of shorts were liquidated.

The objection is wash trading on a thin float. Irys's twelve pairs above $5m all print between $0.065077 and $0.066327, a 1.92% spread, so the venues are arbitraged. Against full supply rather than float, Irys still turns 1.61 times its $661m fully diluted value, the highest in the scan. The figures decay fast: Moonbirds' volume fell from $608m to $230m in four minutes as the window rolled past the spike.

What would prove this wrong: the same turnover in a cohort where Korean venues are a minority.

The news

Initia halted its layer-1 and its rollups after an infinite-mint exploit, and its token rose 8.7%. The attacker minted unbacked bridge tokens and cashed out about $2.6m; the chain stopped at 11:41 ET on 23 Oct with no restart time. INIT is $0.1467 on a $31m market value. A chain that cannot settle repriced upward.
Balancer's wind-down specification vote closes 27 Oct at 18:00 UTC against a 5,000,000 BAL quorum. Holders approved shutting the decentralised exchange on 29 Sep with 99.2% of 17,226,164 BAL; providers can withdraw until 30 Oct and the DAO dissolves from 1 Nov. BAL is $0.1206, 99.8% below its high. One of DeFi's oldest venues is closing by vote, not by hack.
Aave is voting to take a tokenized Wellington Management fund as loan collateral. The proposal to onboard mWIN, issued by Midas, to Aave Horizon has 25,574 AAVE for and none against across 52 votes, closing 26 Oct at 15:28 UTC. This is the real-world-asset trade actually being priced, in a week the sector fell 3.75%.
MSTR, the bitcoin-treasury company, rose 6.71% on 23 Oct while bitcoin fell and the miners were sold. It closed at $146.01; Marathon (MARA) fell 6.77%, Riot (RIOT) 8.67% and Coinbase (COIN) 5.03%. Buyers are separating the balance sheet that holds bitcoin from the businesses that mine it.

Token talk: Hyperliquid (HYPE)

HYPE and bitcoin indexed to 100 on 25 September 2026: HYPE ends at 81.8, bitcoin at 95.4 — HYPE finished the month 14 points behind bitcoin. As of 10:20 UTC, 24 Oct 2026.

Hyperliquid (HYPE) is a layer-1 blockchain whose main business is a perpetual-futures exchange with an on-chain order book. Unlike most names here it earns: the exchange took $2.45m of fees in 24 hours, $866m over the past year, and staking produced another $168m.

It is here because the fee line turned while the price kept falling: perpetual fees fell 30.1% in a day and 19.1% on the week. HYPE is $75.33, -3.5% on the day, -5.9% on the week and -18.2% over 30 days against bitcoin's -4.6%, and sits 23.1% below the $97.96 high of 23 Sep.

222.4m HYPE circulate against a 1.00bn cap, 22.2%; market value is $16.76bn, fully diluted $71.94bn. Its chain holds $2.38bn of deposits and $6.86bn of USD Coin, more than Solana's $6.74bn and second to Ethereum. Open interest in HYPE perpetuals is $1.58bn, third on the venue behind bitcoin and ether.

What would change the view: fees back above $3m a day would say the fall is price, not business. Open interest holding $1.58bn while fees slide says the opposite.

Token Tape is written by an automated research desk built and supervised by Eric Manoukian. Figures are pulled live each morning and errors are possible. Nothing here is investment advice. The editor may hold positions in assets discussed.

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