Coming and going
What's being bought and sold*
TOP TRENDING ASSETS
*Trading activity in the past 24 hours on the Uphold platform, as of 8 a.m. 22nd October 2026.
The combined total of buy and sell percentages can exceed 100% due to customers who engage in both buying and selling the same asset within the 24-hour time frame.
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What’s up
A Billion-Dollar Week For Spot Bitcoin ETFs! (Okay, So What?)
Across three days so far this week, U.S.-listed spot Bitcoin ETFs have garnered in excess of $1 billion, according to SoSoValue data.
"Institutional demand shows tentative improvement,” said one crypto exchange executive in an email to CoinDesk.
Whether flows equalling at least a couple hundred million dollars per day can be sustained — and prompt a steeper BTC price climb — remains an open question.
History suggests any meaningful leg higher is going to require an even steadier, beefier pace of inflows. Recent rallies of a robust nature, such as the ones seen in the early and latter parts of 2024, were marked by average daily inflows of at least $200M.
It’s true that in recent months BTC has risen nearly 40% from a near-term low of $60,000 reached at the very end of June. However, over that subsequent four-month stretch, the average net inflow into the BTC ETF complex amounted to only $86M per trading day.
For additional perspective, consider that, since July 1, BTC funds have experienced seven days of net inflows totaling at least $500M, or a bumper intake once every 11 trading days, as CoinDesk pointed out. Earlier rallies, including one in Q2 of last year, saw a half-billion worth of net inflows happen once every five days.
What's down
A Not So Merry-Go-Round
The largest crypto looked destined to crack $85K on Wednesday although clearly it was not meant to be. Bitcoin’s energetic trek — from $82.5K as of early yesterday morning to about $84.8K as of late yesterday afternoon — was followed by a sharp decline that lasted through the night. BTC was sub-$82K when we checked the charts just before 9 a.m. (EST), per CoinGecko.
Not surprisingly, BTC’s snap-surge squeezed the snot out of short sellers. And then, just as swiftly, the leg down decimated bullish bets. Through it all, more than $400M worth of positions were liquidated, according to CoinDesk, citing CoinGlass data.
What's next
The Dawning Of A New AERO
A brand new DEX, Aero, on Wednesday announced its arrival. The on-chain spot exchange was spawned by the merger of Aerodrome, which runs on Base, an Ethereum layer-2 scaling network, and Velodrome, which runs on OP Mainnet, also an Ethereum L2.
Aero will span across seven networks. Three, of course, are the Ethereum mainnet, Base and OP Mainnet. The four others are: Robinhood Chain; Ink; Arc and Arbitrum. As part of the merger, as The Block explained, the existing AERO and VELO tokens will migrate to a new AERO token.
"Every market is coming on-chain,” said Alex Cutler, CEO of Dromos Labs, which is the team behind the newly created Aero DEX. “And any institution that can be distilled into code will be. Their margin is our opportunity.”
Aero boasts of a new economic framework designed to incentivize liquidity providers and reward the staked AERO holders who coordinate its network, The Block said.
The system’s central feature is called ”Predictive Allocation.” It’s a means of allowing participants to stake AERO and steer liquidity rewards toward the markets that they expect to generate the most revenue.
Another upgrade, dubbed “Slipstream V3,” introduces dynamic fees that rise when markets move fast, said The Block.
