No. 5Sunday, 25 October 20266 min read

Prediction markets took 8.5% of crypto's fees on Saturday

On Monday they take 3.3%, and Utah is suing to claw back up to $61m of the business.

BTC $80,330 -0.2%ETH $2,329 -1.5%SOL $100.82 -0.5%XRP $1.29 +1.5%

Good morning. Bitcoin is $80,330, down 0.2% on the day and 4.9% on the month, and the spot funds sold $773.4m across the last two sessions. The weekend's business is elsewhere: traders paid prediction markets $5.54m in fees in 24 hours, within $141,000 of every decentralised exchange in crypto combined.

The tape

24-hour change: JCT +100.9%, T +47.7%, XRP +1.5%, BNB +0.8%, BTC -0.2%, SOL -0.5%, ETH -1.5%, ORDER -39.6%, IRYS -45.8%, BIRB -49.3% — Janction doubled; Friday's three biggest gainers lost half. As of 10:16 UTC, 25 Oct 2026.

Bitcoin (BTC) $80,330, -0.2% on the day and -4.9% over 30 days. Ether (ETH) $2,329, -1.5% and -13.6%. Solana (SOL) $100.82, -0.5% and -14.0%. XRP $1.29, +1.5% and -16.2%. The market is $2.68tn, -3.0% in 24 hours; bitcoin's share 60.1%.

Gainers: Janction (JCT), a marketplace renting out spare graphics processors for artificial-intelligence work, +100.9% and +285% on the week; Threshold Network (T), which runs the tBTC bitcoin bridge, +47.7%. Friday's winners gave it back: Orderly (ORDER) -39.6%, Irys (IRYS) -45.8%, Moonbirds (BIRB) -49.3%. Privacy led the week again at +4.8% cap-weighted, the only sector up besides memes at +0.8%. Monero (XMR) is +5.8% over 30 days, the only top-20 name up on the month.

Where to look

Six things today, in order: funds sold two sessions, retail still levered long, 30 Oct expiry and the Fed, on-chain dollars still draining, coins leaving exchanges, yield below bills.

OKX long/short account ratio: DOGE 4.74, XRP 3.38, SOL 2.90, HYPE 2.55, ETH 2.35, BNB 2.26, BTC 2.06 — Every name has more than twice as many long accounts as short. As of 10:08 UTC, 25 Oct 2026.

01
Spot bitcoin funds sold $773.4m over two sessions: $635.5m on 22 Oct and $137.9m on 23 Oct.
BlackRock's IBIT lost $254.1m then $110.3m and Fidelity's FBTC $217.5m then $31.8m; Morgan Stanley's MSBT was Friday's only buyer at $4.2m. 22 Oct was the largest single-day outflow since 25 June, yet the week closed positive at $228.2m.
WatchA third outflow session on Monday 26 Oct.
02
Retail is 4.74 to one long Dogecoin (DOGE) on OKX, 3.38 on XRP, 2.06 on bitcoin.
Every ratio eased from Friday, when DOGE hit 5.04 and ether 2.85, but accounts are still twice as long as short into the Federal Reserve decision on 28 Oct at 14:00 ET.
WatchThe bitcoin ratio above 2.20 with price below $80,000.
03
The 30 Oct options expiry holds 136,022 bitcoin contracts, $10.91bn, 35.3% of all bitcoin options open interest.
Calls outnumber puts 87,538 to 48,484, a put/call ratio of 0.55. On Deribit, the options venue, the 30 Oct future trades 0.100% above spot, 7.3% annualised against 5.6% for 25 December: the dearest contract to hold settles that week.
WatchThat 7.3% collapsing toward December's 5.6%.
04
The stablecoin float is $302.60bn, down $3.20bn over 30 days.

The deep dive

Traders paid prediction markets $5.54m in fees in the 24 hours to 10:08 UTC, $141,000 short of every decentralised exchange in crypto combined and $1.26m more than every derivatives venue. The category is Polymarket's two entities and Predict Fun; we summed every protocol's fees by category over the window. Prediction markets are crypto's second-largest fee business after stablecoin issuers, and they get there on Saturdays.

Prediction-market fees as a share of all crypto protocol fees by weekday: Monday 3.33%, Tuesday 3.71%, Wednesday 3.84%, Thursday 3.56%, Friday 4.05%, Saturday 5.59%, Sunday 5.80% — The weekend is a different business. Mean share of all protocol fees by weekday, 2 Aug to 24 Oct 2026. As of 10:08 UTC, 25 Oct 2026.

Across the 84 complete days to 24 Oct, prediction markets took 5.59% of all crypto protocol fees on Saturdays and 5.80% on Sundays, against 3.33% on Mondays. That is $4.08m a day at the weekend against $2.90m Monday to Friday: a 41% rise on the two days crypto's own fees fall, from $79.6m to $72.6m. Yesterday printed 8.5%, half again the Saturday mean, because the category is growing: $125.2m over 30 days against $93.4m at Uniswap, the largest decentralised exchange by volume, and $80.9m at Hyperliquid.

Two things cut against it. Growth has stalled: Polymarket's week is 8.6% below the prior one in the US and 6.9% below internationally, though both are up over 61% on the month. And fees are what traders pay, not what a venue keeps: of $5.15m collected, its entities kept $1.17m, 8.2% in the US and 52.1% internationally. Neither dents the weekday pattern. And the crypto content is incidental: its 40 crypto events traded $3.40m between them in the same 24 hours, less than the day's fees.

What would prove this wrong: a weekend where these fees fall below 4% of the total while every other fee line holds.

The news

Swell, a liquid-staking protocol, paused swETH and rswETH after both quoted rates above the ether they hold. swETH ran about 6% over its last clean reading and rswETH 5%, after a leaked key at the cloud platform Railway exposed roughly 2,500 ETH. No ether has left; a token mispricing itself upward is harder to unwind.
Balancer's wind-down specification has drawn 9 BAL against a 5,000,000 BAL quorum. It closes 27 Oct at 18:00 UTC; a sibling proposal on leftover AAVE rewards has 303,328 BAL. Holders of one of DeFi's oldest exchanges voted 99.2% to shut it in September and will not turn up to agree how.
Aave, the largest lending protocol, is voting to take a tokenized Wellington Management fund as collateral: 113,322 AAVE for, none against. It closes 26 Oct at 15:28 UTC, up from 25,574 AAVE two days ago, and the lending market Exactly Protocol's vote on Coinbase stock tokens has 682,005 for. Equity collateral passes unopposed as lending tokens fall 7.2% a week.
Ether's implied volatility is 53.64 against bitcoin's 38.80. Both rose this week, bitcoin's from 34.62 a month ago. Options cost 1.4 times as much on the asset down 13.6% on the month as on the one down 4.9%.

Token talk: Threshold Network (T)

tBTC bitcoin deposits over 89 days: $316m in late July, a peak of $376m on 11 October, $341m now — Deposits are down 5.8% in 30 days while the token rose 24.5%. As of 10:13 UTC, 25 Oct 2026.

Threshold Network (T) runs tBTC, a bridge that takes bitcoin and issues a matching token on Ethereum and six other chains. Signers hold the bitcoin under threshold signatures, none able to move it alone, and post T as a bond. The token earns the minting and redemption fees.

It is here because it rose 47.7% on $172.7m of volume against a $76.0m market value, a turnover of 227% and the highest of any gainer we scanned. No announcement explains it. Upbit, South Korea's largest exchange, did $124.2m of it and Bithumb $15.9m: two Korean venues are 81.2% of the day's trading.

All 11.155bn T circulate, so market value and fully diluted value are the same $76.0m. The bridge holds $340.9m of bitcoin, down from $375.5m on 11 Oct, so the token is worth 22.3% of the bitcoin it bonds. T is +24.5% over 30 days, -46.8% over a year and 97.0% below its March 2022 high of $0.226934.

What would change the view: deposits back above $376m would mean the bridge is winning bitcoin, not the token winning Korean flow. Deposits falling while the token holds 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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