Bitcoin ended Monday at $80,006 — flat to the cent, after dipping to $79,309 and recovering. A flat price usually means a boring day. Monday was not boring; it was narrow. Every dollar of new fund money — $110.3M — went into a single Bitcoin fund, while Ether funds lost $88.6M. The biggest corporate owner bought no coins at all and spent $204.9M tidying up its own finances instead. And a research firm mapped the whole supply. It found that more than half of all Bitcoin — 11.1 million coins — sits with owners nobody can name. Those owners are selling more slowly every year. Our claim: this market is no longer being carried by a crowd. It is being carried by a handful of named buyers and a silent majority of patient owners — and on Monday, only one of the named buyers showed up. What is priced in: caution, not fear. What would prove us wrong: fund money spreading back across many funds and coins this week — or the silent owners starting to move coins at last year's pace.
Prices are Monday's close and early-Tuesday readings. Fund flows are Monday's reported figures. Stock markets last traded Monday, October 26.
| Asset / Gauge | Reading | Signal |
|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin, Monday Oct 26 close | $80,006 (0.0%) | Flat — range $79,309–$80,646 |
| Bitcoin, early Tuesday Oct 27 | ~$79,492 | 37% below the $126,156 record |
| Ether, Monday close | $2,321 (−0.3%) | Down 4.2% in seven days |
| Solana, Monday close | $100.77 (−0.6%) | Hovering at $100 |
| Whole crypto market value | $2.64T (−0.1%) | Bitcoin is 60.7% of it |
| Market breadth (how many rose vs fell), top 50 | 24 up · 20 down · 6 flat | Typical move just +0.1% |
| Dollar stablecoins (digital dollars tied to the US dollar), total supply | $302.8B | Tether USDT $181.9B · Circle USDC $71.3B |
| Bitcoin mining power (network) | 1,079 EH/s | EH/s measures computing power. This is the power guarding the network — near record levels |
| S&P 500, Monday close | 7,676.85 (+0.70%) | Stocks rose; crypto waited |
Read Monday as a standstill with tells. Almost nothing moved. The typical large coin changed by a tenth of a percent. Yet the extremes were extreme. The coin Quant rose 7.4%. The token TON fell 32.0%. TON's fall unwound Sunday's leap in a single session. The broad money is parked. Single stories are doing the trading. Still water in the middle. Rapids at the edges.
Monday's most useful fact is a non-event. US stocks climbed. The S&P 500 rose 0.70%. The Nasdaq rose 0.83%. Artificial-intelligence enthusiasm lifted both, after Anthropic filed its public-listing paperwork. Bitcoin simply closed flat. Over the weekend, Bloomberg had reported Bitcoin falling alongside stock-market nerves. Two assets that fell together did not rise together. Why the rally did not lift crypto is not proven. But the timing rules out the simplest story. Monday was not a broad "sell everything risky" day. It was a crypto-specific pause.
The pause has a date on it. The Fed decides Wednesday at 2 p.m. Eastern, and pricing puts a hold at roughly 90% — rates staying at 3.75%–4.00%. December is the real fork: pricing gives a rise by then about 68% odds. Expensive oil is one reason that fork stays live — Brent crude sat near $110 a barrel on Tuesday morning, high enough to keep inflation worries warm and give the Fed cover to sound tough. Thursday then brings growth and inflation figures that can extend Wednesday's move in either direction.
For your calendar, whatever you own: hold any big borrowing, pricing, or budget decision until after Wednesday, October 28, at 2 p.m. Eastern. That is when the Fed decides. A coin, a mortgage rate, and a tech stock all answer to that one announcement this week. Crypto is just the asset honest enough to sit still and admit it is waiting.
The fund split, in one day. Monday's fund flows were the cleanest picture of this market yet. Bitcoin funds took in $110.3M. One fund accounted for all of it: BlackRock's IBIT, its Bitcoin fund, traded on the stock market like a share. The other eleven tracked funds recorded exactly zero. Ether funds lost $88.6M, Solana funds $8.2M and XRP funds $3.6M, leaving all crypto funds combined barely positive at +$9.9M. One buyer outweighed three exits. Zoom out and the week is still red: the four largest Bitcoin funds lost a net $118.7M over October 20–26. Monday's inflow is a pulse, not a trend — one more day like it starts an argument; a reversal ends one.
The biggest buyer bought itself. Strategy, the largest corporate Bitcoin holder, bought no Bitcoin in the week to October 25. It was its first pause after five straight buying weeks. Instead, it spent $204.9M buying back 2,068,459 of its own preferred shares. A preferred share pays a fixed dividend, like interest. Strategy sold these shares to raise money. It paid about $99.07 each. Its pile is unchanged at 848,517 BTC, bought at an average $75,446 — a price only about 6% above that average cost. Its everyday cash fell from $447.3M to $242.4M, while a separate $4.83B reserve, set aside to pay dividends and interest, stayed untouched. Read it plainly: even the most committed buyer in this market now spends some weeks defending the machine that funds the buying. Two tripwires tell you if maintenance ever turns into distress: Bitcoin falling toward that $75,446 average cost, which would put the whole pile under water — or the company starting to spend the untouched $4.83B reserve. Neither has happened. A smaller rival showed the other path — Strive added 6,182 BTC for about $511M, taking it to 43,000 BTC. And Ether's biggest corporate holder, Bitmine, kept buying Ether even as it also bought back its own shares. The treasury era has entered its maintenance phase: the question is no longer who buys, it is who can keep their financing intact while they do.
And underneath it all, the silent majority. Galaxy Research mapped who holds Bitcoin's roughly 20.1 million mined coins and found about 11.1 million — roughly 55% — in wallets tied to no known owner: not an exchange, not a fund, not a government. Coins untouched for at least five years are moving at about 34,000 BTC a month, down from 47,000 in 2025 and 67,000 in 2024. Some of those silent coins are lost forever; some belong to institutions nobody has identified — the honest caveat. But the direction is consistent: old supply is waking up more slowly each year, while funds and treasuries absorb much of what does move. Galaxy's conclusion, stated as its own view and not a consensus: the bear market is over, a call it says a weekly close below $76,540 with no recovery within a month would challenge. Note where that line sits — about 4% below Monday's close. The bull case and its own exit sign are uncomfortably close together.
The Ethereum Foundation offered a footnote in the same spirit: it sold 2,785 ETH for about $6.42M on Monday, swapping into a dollar token to fund its work — a routine treasury sale under its published policy, small against daily trading, and a useful reminder to check the size of any "insider selling" headline before reacting to it.
For you, dated: set one check for Sunday, November 1. Look at Bitcoin’s weekly close. Above $76,540, Galaxy’s case stands. Below it, that case is challenged, by Galaxy’s own line. One check, once a week, is enough.
While traders watched a flat price, Ottawa published the most consequential crypto document of the week. Draft regulations released October 24 would bring Canada's Stablecoin Act to life. Any company issuing digital dollars outside the banking system must register with the Bank of Canada. It must hold reserves of at least one dollar for every token. It must let holders cash out one-for-one within 3 business days. It may charge no more than 1% to do it. Issuers could not pay interest for simply holding a token, and could not imply the government's backing. The draft is open for comment for 60 days, until December 23, with the rules aimed at taking effect in fall 2027.
Why this matters beyond Canada: stablecoins — all $302.8B of them — are becoming regulated payment instruments, not trading chips. A rulebook like this converts "trust us" into audited reserves, deadlines, and fee caps, and it hands the business to whoever can run bank-grade compliance. That is exactly the contest McKinsey's newest work describes inside banks. Its October 26 study covers AI in financial-crime prevention, and the software it describes can work through a list of monitoring tasks on its own, flagging the cases humans must judge. The study finds a year of real delivery behind the technology, and it sets out the questions institutions must answer to scale it. Watching transactions for illicit finance is precisely the workload a registered stablecoin issuer must now perform. Where the analogy breaks: a bank answers to one regulator with a century of precedent behind it; a token issuer in 2027 will be building the precedent while operating under it, in several countries at once.
Career takeaway, with dates on it: the consultation closes December 23 and the rules bite in fall 2027 — that is a planning window, not a headline. Does your firm touch payments, treasury, or cross-border customers? Then make one concrete move this quarter. Ask one question in writing. Under a one-to-one, three-day, fee-capped regime, which of our payment flows get cheaper? Which get impossible? The professionals who own this file will be the ones who can answer before the rules are final. The hiring follows in compliance, payments, and treasury roles attached to digital cash.
Tuesday: consumer confidence and durable-goods data (orders for long-lasting factory goods), plus whether fund money spreads beyond one fund. Wednesday: the Fed at 2 p.m. Eastern — the decision is priced; the December language is not. There is also a priced bet on exactly that window. It was placed on Derive. Derive is an options venue — a market for contracts that pay off at a set price on a set date. One trader bought 800 contracts. They pay off if Bitcoin tops $90,000 by November 6. That date is just after the November 3 midterm vote. The contracts cover about $68M in face value, as reported. Face value is the full amount the contracts cover. It is not the price paid for them. The clever part is the funding. The trader sold other options. Those sales gave up gains if Bitcoin runs too far or too early. They also brought in more than the bet cost. About $940,000 was left over. Read it correctly: it is a bet on one specific week, paid for by capping the prize — a calendar trade, not a prophecy. Derive's implied odds — the chance its prices suggest — of Bitcoin above $100,000 by Christmas inched up to 12% from 9.7%. Thursday: growth and inflation data. November 11: index provider MSCI decides whether treasury-heavy companies like Strategy stay in its stock indexes — a removal could force index funds to sell shares they hold on behalf of savers who never chose crypto at all.
Why the surprises are lopsided: the expected Wednesday hold buys little. It is already in the price. A December signal pointing to higher rates hits a market whose support just narrowed to one fund and whose sentiment is neutral rather than washed-out (already sold down hard). Sentiment sat at 48 on the Fear & Greed Index. That index runs from 0 to 100. Zero is fear. One hundred is greed. Neutral crowds still have somewhere to run. The other surprise — money spreading back across funds and coins — would be the first genuinely broad good news in two weeks. The concrete test for that: Bitcoin funds other than IBIT posting inflows two days in a row. Until then, plan for the surprise that hurts. Let the good one be a pleasant problem.