Most investors are still watching the price. The data below tells a different story. In this week’s kickoff, we break down the market structure, show what smart money is doing, and lay out exactly how we think portfolio managers should be positioned for the weeks ahead.

Our Sunday/Monday kickoff covers the data behind this week’s market structure, flows, and positioning. It also covers the macro backdrop and the technical levels that could change the picture over the coming days. The report is built on data and our interpretation, and it is meant to prepare you for the week ahead.

Crypto Market Cap (LHS, $trn) vs. Trading Volumes (RHS, $bn)

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Trading comes down to following a disciplined process, making data-driven decisions, and acting on them with confidence. Sometimes that means going against the crowd. Sometimes it means getting ahead of it.

Bitcoin is trading around the psychologically important $80,000 level, but is this because of thin weekend volume and a false breakdown? What factors should traders focus on? Traders shouldn’t watch only price. Below, we explain what our market structure and factor analysis are signaling and which levels matter for our near-term and medium-term view.

So far, Bitcoin has moved in line with the view we laid out over the past week or two. Three charts matter most right now, and studying them closely should give traders the confidence to stick with the process.

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One-liners across all four coverage areas: Treasury Companies, Diversified Crypto, Bitcoin Mining, and Macro & Crypto FX.

Bitcoin barely moved this week, yet large parts of the crypto market took a hard hit. The gap between the coin and its tied companies widened sharply, and investors rotated in ways that show where conviction is fading and where it is building. Some tokens rallied on buybacks and upgrades, while others gave back their gains despite strong fundamentals. Meanwhile, the bond market sent a signal that could set the tone for the next move. In this report, we cover 45 assets and highlight which trends matter most for positioning ahead of the Fed meeting.

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In the final part of this series, we look at six tokens that have all outperformed Bitcoin since late May, with gains ranging from 39% for Monero to 155% for Pump. fun, while Bitcoin rose about 10%. Part 1 showed what drove the large caps. Part 2 showed how coin-specific stories allowed tokens such as Uniswap and Zcash to break away from the market.

This report shows the same pattern from a different angle. Pump. fun, Pyth and Ethena were rerated once a specific catalyst took place. As in the first two parts, we have lined up every weekly move with its main driver, and the charts are collected in a chart book that readers can print and keep as a reference.

This third part also includes an eight point overview about the lessons from all three reports.

As with Part 1 and Par 2, we have compiled the charts into a PDF chart book that readers can keep for reference or print.

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In the first part of this series, we showed which drivers impacted Bitcoin and the large-cap coins since June. This second part looks at the other side of the market. Hyperliquid, Zcash, NEAR, Uniswap, and Arbitrum are all up between 42% and 142% since late May, while Bitcoin is up about 10%. Very little of that came from the wider market. Each token had its own story.

As in Part 1, we have lined up each weekly move with its main driver, and the charts are collected in a chart book that readers can print and keep as a reference. The pattern is clear. The rallies that lasted were backed by real demand for the token, while upgrades and announcements on their own rarely moved the price for long.

Just for Part 1, we have also compiled the charts into a PDF chart book so readers can keep it as a reference and print it.

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This report analyzes key inflection points, breaks down critical technical support thresholds across major tokens, and details our actionable relative-value model portfolio recommendations to navigate current market volatility.

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This is the first of three reports that step back to look at why crypto has moved up and down since June. Day to day, it is easy to lose sight of the bigger picture.

Every week, usually on Friday, we send out our ‘One Liners: Crypto Market Drivers’ report, which highlights the most important catalysts driving cryptocurrencies that week. This series brings those weeks together into a 20-week review and lines each event up against the weekly returns it produced.

Looking at the full period, a clear pattern emerges. A handful of flow and macro events drove the largest swings, while many headlines that looked important at the time sold off within days. Bitcoin is driven mainly by macro factors, but altcoin drivers are often coin-specific, as Hyperliquid, Zcash, and NEAR will show in one of our next reports.

In this first part, we cover Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, BNB, and XRP, with a chart for each showing the weekly move and its main driver. We have kept the charts on a white background in case readers want to print them. Financial markets produce a lot of noise, and revisiting the drivers this way has always helped us remember which events matter and how investors decide their next move.

We have also compiled the charts into a PDF chart book so readers can keep it as a reference and print it.

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Since September 22, Bitcoin is down 5%. The Bitcoin miners we track are down 28% to 53%. Even MARA, the stock still most closely tied to Bitcoin, has fallen 45%. The miners that moved into AI hosting have quietly changed what drives their shares. Their correlation with Bitcoin has dropped to 0.29 since July. The selloff was not about Bitcoin or Treasury yields.

In this report, we explain when and why the link to Bitcoin broke, what miners trade on now, why funding mattered more than tenant quality, and the credit level that will tell investors when it is safe to buy again.

Because the drivers of miner share prices have changed, we also outline when investors can start buying again, which events and credit levels would trigger it, and what to monitor in the meantime.

Sell-off in CoreWeave and Oracle stocks and bonds is troubling BTC miners

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How should traders be positioned around Ethereum and which technical level matters for Bitcoin? Investors who still hold altcoins should watch several indicators, which we explain below.

Our Sunday/Monday kickoff covers the data behind this week’s market structure, flows, and positioning. It also covers the macro backdrop and the technical levels that could change the picture over the coming days. The report is built on data and our interpretation, and it is meant to prepare you for the week ahead.

Crypto Market Cap (LHS, $trn) vs. Crypto Trading Volumes (RHS, $bn)

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The miners copied CoreWeave’s model of long leases to AI labs financed with debt, and they now trade on its credit, not on Bitcoin. The stress shows up in CoreWeave’s bonds, but the miners’ shareholders have taken the losses.

This report sets out how the repricing happened so quickly: CoreWeave’s balance sheet, its customer and contract risks, the September convertible that marked the top of the rebound, and why funding the miners’ next megawatts now costs much more. We close with what portfolio managers should watch before trying to call a bottom.

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The real thesis is what happens when launch costs hit $100 per kilogram, a 500x reduction from where the industry started. At that price, data centers move to orbit. Cooling becomes free. Power becomes abundant. Jurisdiction disappears. And Bitcoin, which has always had one remaining physical vulnerability, finally loses it.

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Most people associate SpaceX with Mars. That is by design. The Mars narrative serves Elon Musk’s personal brand, attracts talent who want to work on civilization-scale problems, and provides regulatory cover for launch frequency. It is a story, and a useful one. But Mars generates no revenue, has no timeline, and has no customers. What SpaceX sells is access to low Earth orbit at a cost no competitor can match. That is business. Everything else flows from that.

The real thesis is the physics of (data centers) computing in space. Data centers have three fundamental problems on Earth: heat, power, and jurisdiction. Cooling alone consumes 30-40% of a typical data center’s energy budget. In space, heat directly radiates into a 3 Kelvin background, making cooling essentially free. Power density in LEO runs at 1,360 watts per square meter, compared with roughly 1,000 at Earth’s surface, with no atmospheric absorption, no weather, and no night cycle if orbits are designed correctly.

And a data center in orbit sits in no jurisdiction, governed not by local law or government access orders, but by whoever controls the encryption keys. Space solves all three simultaneously. That is not a science fiction scenario. It is an engineering and cost problem, and SpaceX is the only company that has solved the cost side.

The cost to orbit is the gating variable. Until SpaceX, putting one kilogram into LEO cost approximately $54,000 on a Delta IV. Falcon 9 brought that to $2,700. Starship, once operational at scale, aims to target below $100 per kilogram. That is a 500x reduction in 15 years. At $54,000/kg, space data centers are science fiction. At $100/kg, they are infrastructure investment decisions. The entire thesis turns on Starship’s launch economics, which is why the IPO valuation matters; the market is being asked to price not current Starlink revenue but the option value on what becomes possible when launch costs hit the floor.

Microsoft announced in 2023 that it would put Azure computing infrastructure into space via a partnership with SpaceX. This was not a press release about Mars. It was a hyperscaler acknowledging that orbital compute has a viable unit economics case. Google, Amazon Web Services, and defense contractors have made similar moves. The customers exist. The demand is real. The constraint is launch cost and launch frequency, both of which SpaceX controls.

The US military, Pentagon’s Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract, the proliferated LEO satellite programs, and the classified payloads SpaceX already launches all point in the same direction: the DoD wants a resilient, distributed, unjammable computing and communications infrastructure that cannot be taken out by a ground strike on a fixed facility.

A ground-based data center can be bombed. The constellation of orbital compute nodes is effectively indestructible with current weapons. This is why defense primes Northrop, Raytheon, and L3Harris are all building space-based ISR and compute capabilities, and why they are all dependent on SpaceX for launch capacity.

The current objection to orbital data centers is latency. LEO is 550km up; the round-trip signal delay is ~5ms versus sub-1ms for terrestrial. For most AI inference workloads, financial settlement and data storage are irrelevant. The latency constraint only matters for high-frequency trading and real-time control systems, a small fraction of total compute demand. As laser inter-satellite links mature, Starlink is already deploying them, creating a global mesh network in which data routes through space rather than through undersea cables. For long-distance traffic, the space route is faster than fiber, because light travels faster in a vacuum than in glass. Physics favors space routing for transcontinental data transfer.

Bitcoin (LHS) vs. UFO ETF, Space ETF (RHS)

Bitcoin has a physical vulnerability. To transact, internet infrastructure is needed, and states own, route, and censor it. Undersea cables, terrestrial ISPs, and DNS servers are all points of control. A state that can cut the internet can freeze your Bitcoin. Starlink solves Bitcoin’s last physical dependency. A low-earth-orbit satellite constellation provides internet access from space, no cables, no terrestrial chokepoints, no single jurisdiction. Bitcoiners can run a BTC node and broadcast transactions from anywhere on Earth’s surface with a dish the size of a laptop. Bitcoin is not just cryptographic money, but cryptographic money running on infrastructure that no single government can shut down.

SpaceX is not just Starlink’s launcher; it is the only entity currently capable of building and maintaining a LEO constellation (network of satellites operating in Low Earth Orbit) at the required scale. Starlink has 7,000 satellites in orbit today, with regulatory approval for 42,000. No other operator is close. This creates the infrastructure monopoly, making the thesis real rather than theoretical. SpaceX holding 8,285 BTC on its balance sheet is not incidental. It signals that the company understands exactly what it is building. Starlink is the physical layer; Bitcoin is the financial layer. Together, they constitute a parallel monetary and communications infrastructure that sits outside state jurisdiction.

An orbital data center running Bitcoin nodes or financial infrastructure is the complete realization of the Sovereign Individual thesis. Not just censorship-resistant money, but censorship-resistant compute, the ability to run applications, store data, and process transactions in a jurisdiction that does not exist on any map. The combination of Starlink connectivity and orbital compute closes the loop entirely.

When SpaceX lists, the market will price it as a launch company and a satellite internet company. That is the visible business. The invisible business, the option on orbital compute, defense infrastructure, and jurisdiction-free data processing, will not be in the analyst models for the first two years.

That mispricing is the trade. Companies that understand what SpaceX is building, not a rocket company, not a Mars program, but the physical infrastructure layer for post-national computing, will be positioned before the narrative catches up to reality. The space economy is not about SpaceX going to Mars. It is about SpaceX making Earth’s surface optional for the institutions that currently have no choice but to be on it.

The tools that decentralize power and the tools that concentrate it are identical. Cryptography, satellites, and AI are simultaneously the infrastructure of liberation and the infrastructure of the most sophisticated surveillance state ever built.

Palantir was built on a single insight: governments have infinite data and no ability to use it. Palantir sells access to it. Gotham, its government platform, aggregates signals intelligence, financial flows, social graphs, and physical movement into a single operational picture. ICE uses it to track undocumented migrants. The DoD uses it to target drone strikes.

Palantir requires cooperation from the infrastructure layer. It needs telecoms to provide metadata, banks to provide transaction records, and ISPs to provide browsing data. A citizen on Starlink, paying in Bitcoin and running communications through encrypted channels, leaves almost nothing for Palantir to ingest in that infrastructure. The surveillance state’s weakness is that it depends on centralized chokepoints, and SpaceX/Bitcoin/encryption systematically eliminates them.

Bitcoin (LHS) vs. Palantir (RHS)

China has built the most complete proof of concept for the counter-thesis. The Social Credit System, the Great Firewall, digital yuan with programmable spending constraints, and Huawei’s export of surveillance infrastructure to 70+ countries represent a coherent alternative vision: AI as the enforcement layer for total state legibility. Every citizen is fully readable, fully controllable, and fully dependent on state-mediated infrastructure.

The digital yuan is the most important piece. It is not just a payment system; it is a programmable ledger that allows the state to set expiry dates on money, restrict spending by category, freeze accounts without judicial process, and monitor every transaction in real time. It is the exact opposite of Bitcoin. Same technology stack, inverted power structure.

AI is the leverage multiplier for whichever side controls the infrastructure. The race is therefore not between freedom and control in the abstract. It is between two infrastructure buildouts happening simultaneously: the decentralized stack (Bitcoin, Starlink, encryption, private compute) and the centralized stack (CBDC, Palantir, facial recognition, state-controlled AI). Whoever gets to most of the world’s population first, with their infrastructure, their defaults, their interfaces, wins the next century.

States cannot run a Chinese-style surveillance system on a population that has already migrated to Starlink connectivity, Bitcoin settlement, and encrypted compute. Palantir versus Bitcoin, digital yuan versus Starlink, state AI versus private compute, is arguably the most important investment and geopolitical question of the next decade.

Palantir is building the infrastructure that makes states more powerful, AI-enabled surveillance, targeting, and population management. SpaceX is building the infrastructure that makes states less powerful, enables unjammable communications, provides jurisdiction-free money transaction capabilities, and enables private computing. Both are using the same underlying technologies. The question is not which side wins. The question is which side you own.

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One-liners across all four coverage areas: Treasury Companies, Diversified Crypto, Bitcoin Mining, and Macro & Crypto FX.

Bitcoin edged up 0.7% on the week, but most of the crypto complex told a different story. Mining stocks fell between 8% and 26% as stress in AI credit markets, CoreWeave’s bond yields near 15% and a 10-year Treasury yield at 5.33% hit every company that needs debt to build data centers.

Platforms with lighter balance sheets held up much better, with Circle up 7.6% and Coinbase up 6.9%. MicroStrategy failed MSCI’s new screen for non-operating companies, but the index rules give it more time than the headlines suggest. In altcoins, breadth and correlation still support an altcoin season, yet momentum is fading and the gains are concentrated in a few sectors, led by PYTH, NEAR, OP and ARB.

Below, we go through more than 50 stocks and tokens and explain what drove each move and what we are watching next.

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US CPI YoY (LHS) vs. Crude Oil (RHS)

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We tested that assumption against every systematic strategy we run over both a eleven-year and a five-year window, and the results weren’t what most investors would expect. The forces behind Bitcoin’s past returns have changed, and so has the way the market trades.

This matters for anyone who owns Bitcoin today, whether through ETFs, on a balance sheet, or in a trading book, because the approach that worked best in the past may not work from here.

In this report, we show which strategies still hold up, which have stopped working, and what that means for how investors should manage Bitcoin exposure from here.

25% a Year in Bitcoin since 2021, While Buy-and-Hold Made 8%

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Our Sunday/Monday kickoff covers the data behind this week’s market structure, flows, and positioning, along with the macro backdrop and technical levels that could change the picture over the coming days. Each week, we start from the data, add our interpretation, and show where the next moves are likely to come from.

Crypto Market Cap (LHS, $trn) vs. Trading Volumes (RHS)

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One-liners across all four coverage areas: Treasury Companies, Diversified Crypto, Bitcoin Mining, and Macro & Crypto FX.

Last week in ‘10x Research One Liners’, we flagged two risks.

First, Anthropic’s IPO had slipped from October to after the midterms, though its prospectus points to a valuation above $2 trillion, and prediction-market odds of a listing had eased from 96% into the 80s as sentiment cooled across AI stocks.

Second, AI infrastructure was being derated: Sell ratings on CoreWeave and Nebius, driven by falling GPU prices, undercut the contracted cash flows that miners’ HPC pivots are valued on. The neoclouds kept falling even as the Nasdaq rose, a sign of sector-specific pressure. That pressure has now reached the miners, with most falling 11% to 21% over the past week, while Bitcoin lost only 2.5%. Investors now price them as leveraged AI-infrastructure builders rather than Bitcoin proxies.

Three things drove the selloff: Bitmine ending its ETH buying, Treasury yields at their highest since 2002 raising refinancing costs for heavily indebted miners, and the OpenAI revenue report raising doubts about the tenants behind their AI leases.

Miners now carry rate and counterparty risk on top of Bitcoin, so a recovery likely needs lower yields and confirmed AI revenue. CPI, the FOMC meeting and Q3 earnings are the next tests, and analysts will likely cut price targets afterward.

Bitcoin has diverged from the software ETF (IGV), which is back at its October 2025 highs while Bitcoin remains well below its peak. Coinbase and MicroStrategy are also lagging Bitcoin’s rebound from $63,000 to $82,000.

BITCOIN

Bitcoin (−2.5%): Spot ETF outflows of $484.9 million and $651 million in long liquidations pushed Bitcoin to a one-month low near $80,000. It steadied around $82,000, below the ETF buyers’ average cost of about $84,300.

DIVERSIFIED CRYPTO

Galaxy Digital (−11.8%): The OpenAI revenue report sank Helios tenant CoreWeave and hit AI data-center landlords broadly. Weaker crypto prices also weigh on Galaxy’s trading arm.

Coinbase (−2%): Analysts were split on price targets, while Coinbase announced an institutional exchange relaunch with Deribit access and USDC in Samsung Wallet. New CFTC and SEC proposals offered regulatory support.

Robinhood (−3.3%): Robinhood moved to win over Webull customers as China-related concerns hit Webull. BofA and Morgan Stanley raised their targets.

Bullish (−4.8%): September trading volume rose to $48.6 billion from $42.5 billion in August, but the shares still fell.

Circle (+4%): Circle signed stablecoin partnerships with Tereina and Volante Technologies. The CEO and product chief sold shares under trading plans.

BitGo (−0.7%): BitGo signed a broad strategic partnership with HashKey and a separate tie-up with WanCloud.

TREASURY COMPANIES

MicroStrategy (−3.5%): It bought only 334 BTC while spending $73.7 million on STRC buybacks. The stock trades almost purely as a Bitcoin proxy, reversing as Bitcoin failed at $87,000.

Bitmine Immersion (−8.5%): Bitmine signaled its ETH buying is nearly over as it nears its 5% supply target, removing a steady buyer. Sharplink and Strategy also fell 5%.

CEA Industries (−10.1%): Now renamed BNB Standard Corporation, it holds about 515,544 BNB and trades largely on BNB and treasury-company sentiment.

BITCOIN MINING / AI HOSTING

Marathon Digital (−14.1%): JPMorgan double-downgraded MARA to Underweight, citing weaker value from its capital-light AI strategy. Shares fell to near $9.85, though the Street consensus remains Overweight.

Riot Platforms (−14.4%): The OpenAI report hit Riot, whose strategy relies on leases with AMD and an AI lab. A $573 million bridge facility keeps financing risk in focus.

Keel Infrastructure (−15.7%): A research firm flagged concentration risk, with three Pennsylvania campuses making up 860 MW of its 974 MW base case. Shares fell near $3.05 with the sector.

Bitdeer (−12.6%): Bitdeer authorized a $100 million buyback as miners sold off. Its AI story rests on contracted GPU capacity in Malaysia worth over $800 million.

Cipher Digital (−13.9%): Higher yields raised borrowing costs and cut the value of its long-dated lease income. Investors are focused on its $5.4 billion of long-term debt.

CleanSpark (−17.6%): A Form 144 filing signaling possible insider sales added pressure. Its $2.276 billion notes fully fund its Georgia data center, and it will move to quarterly reporting.

HIVE Digital (−16.1%): HIVE topped $1 million in daily revenue from mining and AI cloud but fell with the sector. Analysts remain constructive with a $6.95 average target.

IREN (−15.7%): SemiAnalysis called its British Columbia data centers among the industry’s worst, and Jones Trading started coverage at Hold. The OpenAI report added further pressure.

One-liners across all four coverage areas: Treasury Companies, Diversified Crypto, Bitcoin Mining, and Macro & Crypto FX.

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At the same time, investors are selling meme tokens and older Ethereum DeFi names, but what are they buying instead? Where is the money rotating into? In this report, we look at which indicators still favor altcoins, which are starting to send warning signals, and which levels would make us more cautious.

Bitcoin dominance (LHS) vs. Crypto Market Cap (RHS, $trn)

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Bitcoin holders should also separate the short-term view from the medium-term one. Near-term events such as the midterm elections can heavily influence the short term, while the medium term is still driven by broader fundamentals.

The catalysts we identified previously depend on consensus and market pricing, so we will revisit them early next week, shortly before they arrive. Below, we explain what is driving the current repricing and set out our short- and medium-term views and positioning.

A lot is happening, and several points deserve their own reports, which will follow. The technical picture alone deserves a separate report, since today’s is already long.

Bitcoin: resistance area $82,000 to $87,000 - Stay Long or Cut Exposure?

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See also our report “Bitcoin: How Smart Traders Are Positioning This Month”.

Crypto Market Cap (LHS, $trn) vs. Trading Volumes (RHS, $bn)

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The macro backdrop looks grim. The euro is sliding, sending the dollar sharply higher, and a sell-off in French bonds is spilling over into Treasuries, pushing yields up just as both the ECB and the Fed have turned hawkish. Meanwhile, Trump is moving another aircraft carrier into the Middle East and, once again, threatening fresh strikes. On the surface, the risks are piling up. Yet we see a set of catalysts that could turn this macro risk into a major opportunity, as we explain below.

What makes this moment unusual is how tightly the catalysts are packed: three of them in barely two weeks. Professional traders know that timing is everything, and that the edge comes from recognizing when risk and reward are skewed in their favor.

A cluster of catalysts like this is the kind of setup traders wait for. The key is to identify each one in advance and position before it lands; right now, that positioning is unusually cheap. How long it stays that way depends on how quickly the rest of the market notices.

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