No. 8Wednesday, 28 October 20266 min read

Ether is 6% above the average holder's cost; bitcoin is 50% above

A 5.4% fall puts the average ether holder at a loss. Bitcoin needs 33.5%.

BTC $81,372 +2.4%ETH $2,366 +2.9%SOL $102.88 +3.6%XRP $1.33 +2.9%

Good morning. Every major is up before the Federal Reserve decides at 18:00 UTC, bitcoin by 2.4% to $81,372, and no US spot bitcoin fund sold on Monday or Tuesday. The number that matters is the cost, not the price: the average ether was bought at $2,238, and ether trades $128 above it.

The tape

24-hour change: BTW +26.5%, PEPE +16.8%, BCH +8.3%, ZEC +6.4%, SOL +3.6%, ETH +2.9%, XRP +2.9%, BTC +2.4%, Q -29.9%, AKE -31.0% — Every major up; Monday's best performer gave back 29.9% of its 42.8%. As of 10:11 UTC, 28 Oct 2026.

Bitcoin (BTC) $81,372, +2.4% on the day, -2.1% on the week, -1.8% over 30 days. Ether (ETH) $2,366.42, +2.9% and -10.6%. Solana (SOL) $102.88, +3.6% and -13.2%. XRP $1.33, +2.9%. Bitcoin is 59.5% of the $2.74tn of crypto value, down from 60.0% yesterday: the alternatives rose faster for once.

Pepe (PEPE), the frog meme token, added 16.8% on $595m of volume. Bitcoin Cash (BCH), the 2017 fork that raised bitcoin's block size, rose 8.3%; Zcash (ZEC), the privacy coin, 6.4% to $1,316.40. Bitway (BTW), the token of a yield and payments network, led at +26.5% on $13.6m of volume against a $2.60bn market value. The falls were Monday's winner going back: Quack AI (Q), a governance service for software agents, -29.9% after +42.8%, and Akedo (AKE), which generates games from written prompts, -31.0%.

Where to look

Five things today, in order: the Federal Reserve decision, two clean ETF sessions, retail cutting longs, Friday's options expiry, futures basis over bills.

Implied probability bitcoin settles above each level on 29 October: $78,000 96.9%, $80,000 83.5%, $82,000 39.5%, $84,000 7.7% — The curve the day after the decision; the pre-decision market prices $82,000 at 27.5%. As of 10:11 UTC, 28 Oct 2026.

01
The Federal Reserve decides at 18:00 UTC, and the market prices a wider bitcoin after it than before.
Polymarket's 28 October contract settles at 16:00 UTC, two hours ahead, and puts bitcoin above $80,000 at 95.5% and $82,000 at 27.5%. The 29 October contract cuts $80,000 to 83.5% and lifts $82,000 to 39.5%.
WatchThe 29 October $82,000 market above 50%.
02
No US spot bitcoin fund sold on either 26 or 27 October, the first clean pair since 22 September.
BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) took $151m on Tuesday and Fidelity's Wise Origin fund (FBTC) $25m, after $110m into IBIT alone on Monday. October still nets minus $26m over 19 sessions: IBIT plus $1.02bn against FBTC minus $564m.
WatchFBTC buying two days running.
03
Retail cut its long bias into the bounce: OKX accounts are 1.90 long per short in bitcoin, from 2.15 a day earlier.
Ether fell to 2.23 from 2.35 and dogecoin to 4.31 from 4.82, on $2.53bn of bitcoin open interest there. Last week retail doubled longs into a falling price; this week it sold into a rising one, which takes the fuel out of a flush.
WatchThe ratio above 2.0 with bitcoin over $82,000.
04
Friday's bitcoin expiry holds 135,418 contracts, $11.0bn, and turned more call-heavy overnight.

The deep dive

The average ether in circulation was bought at $2,238, and ether trades at $2,366, 5.7% above it. The average bitcoin was bought at $54,081, and bitcoin trades 50.5% above that. We took each asset's realised capitalisation, the sum of what every coin last moved for, and divided it by circulating supply.

Spot price against the average cost of every coin, 90 days: bitcoin ends at plus 49.4%, ether at plus 4.9% — Ether's cushion over the average holder's cost is almost gone; bitcoin's is 50%. As of 10:11 UTC, 28 Oct 2026.

Ether's average cost is falling: $2,346 on 27 September, $2,238 on 27 October, down $108 in a month, because ether keeps changing hands below the old average. Bitcoin's rose $539 over the same month. A 5.4% fall in ether puts the average holder at a loss; bitcoin needs 33.5%.

Ether closed below $2,238 on 161 of the past 366 days, 44% of them, and on 19 of the past 90, none in the past 30. Bitcoin never traded below $54,081 in the past year: its cheapest day, $58,566 on 1 July, was 8.3% above the average cost. Ether holders have little yield to wait on, with Lido, the largest staking pool at $22.97bn, paying 2.27% a year against 4.22% on a bill.

The objection is that this level marks bottoms, not breaks, and it does: ether's average cost sat above its price for 20 days from 30 July, the price bottomed at $1,843 on 1 August, then rose 46% to $2,685 by 27 September. What would prove the mechanism wrong: a stretch of ether under $2,238 while its average cost rises anyway.

The news

Moody's gave Ripple USD (RLUSD) an A2 long-term and P-1 short-term rating, the first investment-grade mark on a dollar token. The 28 October opinion covers RLUSD as issued by the custodian Standard Custody on the XRP Ledger and Ethereum, against a 103% reserve target held in short-term Treasuries and cash. It rates the issuer's credit, not the peg.
Datavault AI said it cannot withdraw 817.64 bitcoin, worth $66.5m, and its shares fell 49.6% to $0.067. Scilex, which agreed in 2025 to buy $150m of its shares in bitcoin, delivered 1,309.04 coins into an account at the exchange Biconomy off-chain; Datavault sold 491.4 back for $40.5m and a June request to move the rest never completed. Four sets of accounts from the third quarter of 2025 on can no longer be relied upon.
Galaxy Digital swung to a $323m quarterly profit and authorised a $200m buyback. The 27 October results sent the stock up 7% in a week when Coinbase fell 5.7% and Circle 5.0%. A buyback on that quarter says the firm finds its own equity cheaper than anything else it could buy.
Robinhood's crypto revenue fell 55% from a year earlier, while its own chain brought in $26m. Robinhood Chain made over $40m in its first quarter and holds $1.1bn of deposits, $680m of that in Paxos' dollar token USDG and $370m in Ethena's USDe. Last week it earned its lowest weekly revenue yet, 98% below September's peak: the deposits stayed and the trading left.

Token talk: Uniswap (UNI)

Uniswap weekly fees, May to October 2026: version four peaks at $50.1m in the week to 9 September and falls to $9.19m; version three falls from $19.8m to $5.78m — The two versions' combined weekly take has fallen seven weeks running, $69.9m to $15.0m. As of 10:15 UTC, 28 Oct 2026.

Uniswap (UNI) is the largest decentralised exchange: anyone can post two assets into a pool and earn the fee traders pay to swap between them. Since the fee switch passed in December 2025 the protocol keeps a cut of that fee and spends it destroying UNI, so holders are paid in a shrinking supply rather than in cash. 886.70m UNI of a 1bn maximum are left; 113.30m, 11.3% of the cap, has been destroyed.

It is here because the fee pool that funds the burn is collapsing. The two live versions earned $14.96m in the week to 28 October against $69.92m in the week to 9 September, a 79% fall over seven consecutive weekly declines. Version four earned $627,476 on Robinhood's two-month-old chain yesterday and $204,350 on Ethereum itself.

UNI is $7.18, down 18.8% over 30 days, a $4.48bn market value and $6.36bn fully diluted; 624.45m of the remaining supply circulates, 84.0% below the $44.92 high of May 2021. Watch: weekly fees back above $25m, which sets the size of the burn.

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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