海盗鸭

$BTC This week followed the standard pattern of "run-up—digesting".

On September 21–22, Bitcoin rose more than 6% in a single day, briefly touching $87,300, marking a new high since January 2026; on September 23 it pulled back to around $85,600; on September 24 it continued lower to roughly the $84,000–$84,500 range. The "around $84,600" mentioned in the topic refers to this retracement.

The reason was not inside the crypto market, but macroeconomic: the U.S. preliminary composite PMI for September rose to 58.4, the highest since July 2021, weakening short-term expectations for easing; the 10-year U.S. Treasury yield moved back above 5%, and the 30-year yield rose to its highest level since 2004; the U.S. dollar index climbed to a two-month high of around 101; Brent crude oil rose to $103–$105, pushing inflation expectations higher again. When the cost of capital gets more expensive, high-volatility assets are the first to be reduced.

Leverage amplified the move. On September 21, total Bitcoin liquidations across the network exceeded 10 billion yuan; in the 24 hours up to September 23, 91,400 people were liquidated, with a total amount of $292 million. This also explains why the rise was so fast—an important part of the buying pressure came from short covering rather than new spot demand.

But money is still flowing into spot. On September 21, U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs saw net inflows of about $999 million, and on September 22 another $715 million flowed in.

My view is: this looks more like a digestion phase than a trend reversal, and the key dividing line is $82,000. If it holds, the pullback is a healthy position reset; if it breaks below, then watch $80,000–$81,000.

For ordinary users, there are really only two actionable points: don’t bet on direction with high leverage, and treat the continuity of ETF net inflows as an earlier signal than candlestick charts.

Would you treat $82,000 as a buying zone, or a stop-loss zone?

#Bitcoin pulled back to around $84,600 this week

September 22, Rosenblatt first initiated coverage of $SNDKB with a Buy rating and a target price of $2,400. That day the stock rose 6.8% to $1,887, and so far this year it has climbed by about 650%.
The logic is that NAND’s role has changed: Analyst Kevin Cassidy believes that as AI models get larger and inference workloads heavier, buyers are less focused on the lowest price and instead look at storage density, performance, and supply certainty. The support comes from the BiCS8 and BiCS10 3D NAND platforms, as well as “new business model” agreements with eight major customers—covering about 65% of FY2028 production capacity.
The industry backdrop is also helping: Wall Street expects the average prices of storage chips in Q3 2026 to rise quarter over quarter by more than 20%, and the DRAM and NAND shortages may persist into 2027.
I tend to think: long-term supply contracts locking in capacity are the biggest difference in this cycle and compared with the past. NAND for the first time has a bit of “anti-cyclical” flavor. But after it has risen sixfold, can you really trust that long-term contracts will change the cyclicality of memory storage?

On September 21, U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded a total net inflow of $999 million, falling just $1 million short of $1 billion—marking the third straight trading day of net inflows. Two days earlier, they were still seeing net outflows: September 15: -$450 million, September 16: -$296 million, turning positive on September 17 with +$160 million, then +$433 million on September 18, and on September 21 they surged straight to +$999 million—within three days, going from bleeding to gulping down big inflows.

Breaking down the structure is more interesting than looking only at the totals. BlackRock’s products saw a daily inflow of $381 million, ARK and 21Shares’ products $289 million, and Fidelity’s products $239 million—these three took up the vast majority. On the same day, total inflows across Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs amounted to $1.269 billion. The net asset value of all spot Bitcoin ETF assets is about $110.1 billion, accounting for 6.30% of Bitcoin’s total market cap, with a historical cumulative net inflow of $56.16 billion.

My take: this looks more like a centralized pulse, not a broad-based trend. There are two reasons. First, the timing overlaps—on the same day, $BTC once surged above $85,000, and the market saw large-scale short liquidations. ETF inflows and the short-squeeze pressure are squeezed into the same window, making it hard to tell which is causing which. Second, more than 90% of marginal buy pressure comes from just two or three issuers, meaning pricing power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small number of institutions. That implies the flow data will become increasingly “distorted”: rising totals don’t necessarily mean the buying breadth is widening.

For ordinary users, there are few actionable moves, but you can switch the observation focus. Instead of watching the daily total, look at two things: whether subscription/redemption activity from the top issuers shows continuity, and whether funding rates are getting overheated. The “total” number is the easiest to be carried around by the market itself, while the subscription/redemption structure won’t lie.

The question: if on the 22nd the inflow is cut in half immediately, would you read it as “the end of a one-day pulse,” or as a “normal pullback”? What exactly is the decision criterion you’re using in your judgment? #Bitcoin spot ETF net inflow of $999 million

$BNB Market cap returns to about $104.95 billion, surpassing Bank of New York Mellon (about $104.4 billion). It ranks 249th globally by asset market value; up about 12% this month, with the price hovering around $786.

Let’s be clear: this is a “recovery,” not a “new high.” BNB’s all-time high was $1,370 in October 2025, with a market cap of nearly $19 billion. At the end of June, it briefly dropped to $535. In two months, it has recovered about 47%. What I care about structurally is that the intraday gains this round are noticeably smaller than those of other major coins. There’s less short-squeeze pressure—most holders treat it as a tool for fees, gas, and staking, not something they’re betting on directionally.

My take: this move is more use-case driven than leverage driven. It rises more slowly, but it’s stickier. Is $800 the next resistance—do you think it can hold above to open up $850–$900, or will it just go back to grind around $750 again?

#BNBmarketcapSurpassesBankofNewYorkMellon

$ADA Because x402 went up, but the real dispute isn’t whether it has risen—it’s how wide the gap is between “being built into the standard library” and “someone is actually using it.”

The facts: From September 21 to 22, client, server, and facilitator code submitted by engineers from the Cardano Foundation was merged into x402’s official code repository, covering the mainnet, preprod, and preview networks. The first release is in TypeScript, with Python planned. In 24 hours, ADA rose by about 4%, reaching a four-month high. x402 itself is a payment protocol that reuses the HTTP 402 “Payment Required” status code. It enables per-use payments for software and AI agents without accounts, without API keys, and without a checkout page. It is currently governed by the Linux Foundation.

The disagreement is exactly here. Bulls say this is an entry ticket for machine payments, and Cardano’s extended UTxO model is naturally a good fit—payments and their cryptographic proofs are produced within the same signature; the facilitator only verifies and submits, and does not hold private keys or sign on your behalf. Bears say: go look at the rollout. So far, there has been only one real end-to-end demonstration transaction running on the preprod testnet, with none on the mainnet. Meanwhile, in a similar protocol on another chain in the same race, AI-agent payments have already handled at the million-scale.

My stance leans a bit bearish—not because I doubt the technology, but because I doubt the timing. Merging code into the standard library is a zero-cost PR event; commercialization requires someone to actually pay ADA for a single API call. And in the agent-payment market right now, pricing is mainly denominated in stablecoins. Cardano’s facilitator supports three native stablecoins—USDM, DJED, and iUSD— which actually suggests the official side is aware that pricing in volatile assets is a hard problem.

The watchpoints are very specific: when does the mainnet facilitator show up with real traffic, and whether you can see x402’s footprint in the fee revenue.

Which side are you on: an undervalued entry ticket, or a standard-library-level “read and never replied”?

BNB’s market cap is about $104.95 billion, surpassing Bank of New York Mellon and ranking 249th globally by total asset market value. In the same period, $BNB saw a more than 15% gain over seven days, while other major coins such as $ETH are still down 3%–8%. BSC’s 24-hour DEX trading volume briefly spiked to $1.33 billion.

First, let’s talk about the comparison itself: using the market cap of a blockchain token to compare with a bank’s market cap is not rigorous methodologically. A bank’s market cap corresponds to its balance sheet, net interest margin, and regulatory capital requirements—it’s discounted cash flows. BNB, meanwhile, corresponds to on-chain transaction fees, the burn rate, and how hot the narrative is. Putting these two things into the same leaderboard is more entertainment than information.

That said, the direction isn’t entirely wrong. The value-capture chain behind $BNB is clear: on-chain activity generates fees; those fees are used to burn; and the burn reduces circulating supply—this is a tighter closed loop than in most L1s. So while this milestone isn’t a “valuation anchor,” it is a reasonably sound proxy indicator for activity.

What I care about more is what drove this rally. BSC’s activity largely comes from meme coins and high-turnover “coin-stock” style trading, with high volumes but low retention. Once the hype cools off, fees and burn will fall in tandem. So when looking at BNB, it’s not just about which it has surpassed again—it’s whether the burn rate can be maintained and how much of the on-chain activity is reusable.

My view: when valuing $BNB , whether you use a “platform token” framework or a “public chain” framework determines how many multiples you’re willing to pay. In the former, the ceiling is the industry cycle; in the latter, it’s ecosystem expansion. In this rally, the market is clearly pricing it with the latter framework, but the on-chain revenue structure still looks more like the former.

Which framework will you use? That directly determines whether you should add or reduce now.

#BNB market cap surpasses Bank of New York Mellon

Within two weeks, four batches of dormant for more than ten years—$BTC —moved, totaling 1,971 coins, about $161 million. The largest single amount, 1,260.78 coins, came from an address that hadn’t moved since July 2016; even more eye-catching is a 600-coin transfer from a wallet from July 2012. The remaining two transactions came from November 2011 and March 2011. The common thread among these addresses isn’t the amounts, but the labels: three of the four batches bear a Noah Doe marker, corresponding to the lawsuit in New York. The plaintiff argues that 39,069 dormant addresses—about 3.7 million BTC—should be deemed unowned property. This June, the judge has paused the proceedings. I tend to think these transfers themselves are the strongest rebuttal to the “unowned” claim: a dormant address doesn’t mean the private key is lost. How do you interpret it? Is “Old Whale” changing hands, or smearing the lawsuit with attention-grabbing signals?

CME adds $BCH and $UNI to its futures list—scheduled to launch on October 19. The standard contracts are 250 BCH and 10,000 UNI, along with micro contracts of 25 and 1,000. The market responded that night: $BCH rose as much as 27%, while $UNI climbed 4.5%. What’s truly worth watching isn’t the percentage gains—it’s the rhythm of this list. In 2026, CME has already launched multiple altcoin contracts; BCH and UNI are the seventh and eighth. In the first half of the year, its crypto futures and options averaged 279,800 contracts traded per day, with a notional value of $8.3 billion. This means the hedging tools institutions want are being rolled out from mainstream coins to altcoins. But listing doesn’t guarantee buy-side demand—the real test is the open interest after October 19. With BCH up 27% this round, do you think it’s a preemptive reaction, or just a one-day trip?

The $86,000 checkpoint—this time Bitcoin didn’t climb up to it, it crashed into it.

From September 21 to 22, $BTC briefly surged to $87,381, the highest since January this year. On the surface, it’s a price-news story; what’s really worth dissecting is: how many different “doors” money poured into at the same time.

The first door is short sellers. This leg higher triggered liquidations totaling more than $900 million, with shorts making up the vast majority—about $840 million. The key detail is what BTC Markets analyst Rachael Lucas said: normally, a squeeze cuts down open interest, but this time it didn’t—positions were filled back in quickly. Meaning: after the shorts get blown out, new leverage immediately steps in. It’s not risk reduction; it’s chasing the move.

The second door is ETFs. On September 21, U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded a net inflow of $999 million in a single day—the largest since October 2025, and the ninth-largest day ever. Specifically: IBIT $381 million, ARKB $289 million, FBTC $239 million. These three accounted for more than 90% of the total, and cumulative inflows since September reached $1.31 billion. Bloomberg’s James Seyffart noted that this rally pushed prices above the ETF average-cost benchmark of roughly $81,722, and U.S. spot fund investors as a whole returned to profit for the first time since January.

The third door is macro. On August 19, the U.S. Treasury raised the repo limits for 10–20-year and 20–30-year Treasuries from $2 billion per transaction to at least $4 billion. Between September 9 and November 4, this happened seven times. This isn’t quantitative easing—no new reserves were created. It’s more like a 2011-style “twist” operation. But the market reads it as a signal: long-end yields are suppressed, the dollar weakens, and money on the risk curve flows downstream.

My take: among the three doors, ETFs and macro are the slow variables, while the squeeze is a one-off. Positions that were blown out won’t blow up again, so just how far above $86,000 the price can go depends on whether new spot buyers can carry the baton—not on the same batch of shorts contributing repeatedly.

Will you treat this move as the start of a trend, or as a typical squeeze event?

#Bitcoin_breaks_above_May_high_nears_$86,000

Bitcoin climbs above $87,000, hitting an eight-month high. But what I want to discuss is this: in this surge of $BTC , is it really a case of "shorts being carried out," or is spot trading genuinely buying? These two answers point to completely different outlooks for what comes next.

First, let’s look at the data. On September 21–22, Bitcoin quickly surged from the $81,000–$82,000 range, breaking through $84,000 and $85,000, and topping out at $87,381. The 24-hour gain was over 7%. According to CoinGlass, within 24 hours, shorts were liquidated by about $648 million, and total liquidation across the market was about $747 million, including roughly $278 million related to Bitcoin. When the market broke the $84,000 level, short positions worth about $252 million were liquidated in a very short time—an archetypal "breakout → liquidation → another breakout" positive feedback loop.

If the story ended here, it would be purely a game of capital flows—prices rise and then move on.

But there’s one piece of data that doesn’t support that conclusion: U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs saw a net inflow of about $999 million on September 21 in a single day, the largest single-day inflow since late October last year. IBIT contributed $381 million, ARKB $289 million, and FBTC $239 million—equivalent to buying nearly 12,000 BTC in one day. More importantly, during the squeeze, open interest on perpetual futures actually increased by 7.59% to around $15.6 billion, and funding rates did not show signs of overheating.

When open interest doesn’t fall, it usually means that after leverage exits, it’s immediately replaced by new capital. This cuts both ways: it suggests incremental funds are willing to step in and buy at higher levels, but it also suggests the market hasn’t truly "cleaned out" the leverage—any 5% move in either direction could trigger chain reactions of liquidations that exceed expectations.

I tend to believe the nature of this rally falls somewhere between the two: the underlying driver is spot demand, while the pace is driven by leverage. The cost basis zone for spot ETF investors is roughly $85,600, while the cost basis for corporate holdings is about $80,500. Once either of those levels is lost, the leveraged longs that were sitting on unrealized gains will quickly turn into sell pressure.

So the question is simple—and difficult: after the squeeze-buying exhausts, do you think ETF inflows will keep stepping in, or do you think the market will pull back first? If you have $BTC , what would you do with it right now? #BitcoinBreaksAbove87KReachesEightMonthHigh

$SOL has climbed to about $120, a nine-month high—up roughly 16% in a week. A few days ago, it was still below $100.
Old-school trader Peter Brandt pulled up a five-year timeframe cup-and-handle pattern. His confirmation zone is $240 to $260, with a life-or-death line at $80 to $85.
But the most widely circulated “$500” isn’t from him—it’s a call from two other analysts. Brandt’s own key level is only $240—only after it doubles can the pattern be considered valid.
I’m inclined to believe this leg of the $SOL rally is more about broad-market beta than ecosystem improvement. So the $240 confirmation level is more worth watching than the $500 target: until it breaks out, $500 is just talk.
Will you wait for confirmation at $240, or buy in right here?

The total market value of stablecoins has been going down these past two days, with USDT and USDC both included. Meanwhile, Bitcoin is also pushing toward new highs—these two lines have been moving in opposite directions for weeks.

Stablecoins are the reservoir that absorbs fiat inflows across the whole market. When the pool shrinks, it usually means funds are being pulled back into fiat, or at least that no new money is coming in. So these past two days, there have been warnings all over the square about “liquidity being drained.”

Honestly, I don’t quite buy this conclusion. Whether the pool is getting smaller and where the “water” is flowing to are two different things: the outflow could be newly arriving money from outside the market, or it could simply be funds within the market switching into different coins. What we really need to distinguish is which one is actually moving.

Do you think this time someone is really exiting, or is it just people repositioning their holdings?

Tencent has shifted its flagship AI product from Yuanbao to WorkBuddy. Yuanbao is a chatbot assistant for individual users; WorkBuddy is an agent embedded into office workflows. I only noticed this adjustment after it was pushed up on Zhihu. Under that question, the debate got really heated—people were arguing whether this strategic transition counts as a success. I thought the argument wasn’t about success or failure, but about two sides having fundamentally different views of AI. One camp believes in the consumer (C) end: if the user base grows, monetization will always find a way. The other camp believes in the business (B) end: they want the company to pay first, embedding AI into workflows that already cost money. The former bets on the entry point; the latter bets on the invoice. Tencent’s choice is very straightforward: they’re putting resources into the side that can issue invoices. The sharpest part is this: in China, consumer-side AI is hard to charge a subscription fee for, while enterprise procurement can accommodate contracts worth hundreds of thousands of yuan for a year. With the same model capability, the price ceiling for selling to individuals is far lower than selling to a department’s budget. But resource bias and shutting down a product are two different things—Yuanbao is still there; it’s just no longer the main push. Don’t misread that. Are you working on a C-end product, or someone who spends their days dealing with B-end workflows? Which side are you voting for? #Aİ

$DOGE a day saw a 14%–15% rise, breaking above $0.10, with an intraday high around $0.105—the highest since June. The market tends to attribute it to Musk, but the data doesn’t support that claim: over the last 24 hours, the entire market liquidated roughly $795 million in leveraged positions, 82%–84% of which were shorts, involving between 119,000 and 135,000 accounts; Dogecoin’s own short liquidations were about $12.66 million.

So this is a typical leveraged positioning market: shorts are forced to cover, pushing prices higher; the price rally then triggers more short liquidations, creating a self-reinforcing loop. How strong is the real spot demand? On the day, U.S. spot Dogecoin ETFs saw net inflows of $909,700—its largest single day since January and more than three times the prior week—but in absolute terms, it’s only one-thousandth of the market-wide liquidation scale. Put these two magnitudes side by side, and the answer is obvious.

On-chain, whales are indeed moving: several addresses have accumulated between 240 million and 360 million DOGE over a few days, and another four addresses together built about 78.2 million long positions; open interest increased 15%–16% to around $1.5 billion. In terms of technical structure, price broke out of the cup-and-handle pattern formed since June and reclaimed the 200-day moving average (around $0.093). Some have even set a target price of $0.128. However, the 50-day moving average is still below the 200-day line, and the RSI is already at 69–72.

My view: this is a market where “shorts provide the fuel,” not one driven by demand. Whether it can continue depends on whether new money steps in above $0.10—not on how many long positions whales open.

One more point: a certain issuer has announced it will close its own Dogecoin spot ETF. That contradicts the narrative of “new highs in ETF inflows,” and it’s worth paying attention to.

Above $0.10, do you add to your position—or take profit?

#Dogecoin up 15%

The Nasdaq’s new all-time high this round is completely different from the 2023 “rate-cut expectation bull market.”

On September 21, the Nasdaq closed up 2.26% to 27,122.09 points, refreshing the closing record for the first time in more than three and a half months. The next day, during the session it even touched 27,272.72, extending the record. But what’s been rising is extremely concentrated: Meta surged 11.43% in a single day to close at $741.24—adding roughly $190 billion in market value in one day. AMD rose nearly 10% to $615.52, with its market cap first breaking $1 trillion. Intel gained 12.1%, and Arm rose by about 17%.

The mechanism chain is actually quite clear: Meta’s AI agent, Muse, launched less than two weeks ago, and it already surpassed 2.5 million downloads and topped the U.S. App Store free charts—suddenly, the market realized that “agents” are real, consumer-grade products being used by people. For agents to run tasks, they consume CPU scheduling, cloud compute, and rack-level systems—not just GPUs used for training. As a result, CPU, foundry, and connectivity chip makers were all repriced. This rally is about “application delivery,” not a “capital expenditure narrative.”

I tend to think this is a shift in nature. In the past three years, the AI boom was driven by the big players announcing how much they plan to spend. Now, for the first time, the market has seen someone actually roll a product out to consumers—and is willing to charge $20 per month. Whether paid willingness can turn from “novelty” into “habit” is the key.

But there’s one counterintuitive point: the U.S. Federal Reserve only raised rates by 25 bps on September 16 to 3.75%–4.00%, and the dot plot still shows that 16 of 18 officials expect at least one more hike within the year. Hitting new highs during a rate-hike cycle suggests the market is betting on earnings rather than liquidity—this is more solid than a rate-cut bull market, and it’s less vulnerable to disappointing earnings reports.

On the U.S. stocks side linked on-chain, $METAB and $AMDB are the corresponding underlying assets for 24/7 trading. They don’t pause over the weekend, which means when the narrative starts to ferment, prices will move first—and investors in A-shares and U.S. shares can only wait for the market open.

The next two weeks are the exam: will Meta Connect (Sep 23–24) clarify Muse’s commercialization, and can the AI capital expenditures in the Q3 earnings report translate into quantifiable revenue?

Which is your take: is this the turning point where AI moves from “telling stories” to “charging money,” or is it just another time that expectations are priced in too early? Tell me what signal you’re watching. #NasdaqHitsRecordHigh

Bitwise’s NEAR staking ETP in Europe has surpassed $100 million in assets. Break it down: it looks more like a “passive compliance” move rather than institutional accumulation.

It holds 25.2 million $NEAR , worth about $116 million at the price around September 22—doubling over the month. But during the same period, its units only increased from 4,882,271 to 4,912,271—an added 30,000 units, or 0.6%, worth about $639,000. Over $NEAR 30 days, the price rose 135%, and net asset value per unit rose 107%. The near-doubling of scale comes almost entirely from the token price.

Treating the price-leverage effect as “institutional demand validation” is the easiest way for headlines like this to mislead.

What you should be watching instead is fees: the annual fee is 0.85%. Staking rewards are also drawn down by Bitwise—33%. At launch they promoted a net staking yield of 5.5%, but in the latest filings it’s down to just 3.01%. With network rewards declining and the split ratio unchanged, holder returns are close to halving.

The fundamentals do have improvements: Intents’ cumulative trading volume is nearing $30 billion, and part of protocol fees is used for open-market buybacks. The inflation cap has been lowered from 5% to 2.5%. However, daily active addresses are around 60,000—roughly two orders of magnitude behind top L1 chains, still far from the 2022 peak of $20, which is about 80% away. The revised filing for the U.S. spot product was submitted on September 16. The code is NRR, intended to list on NYSE Arca, and has not yet been approved.

My take: assess the ETP’s real demand by unit growth and net subscriptions—not by AUM headlines. If it only issues 0.6% more units in a month, that suggests European money is merely “holding through a packaged product,” not actually adding.

When you invest in a product like this, are you buying the headline that says the size broke $100 million—or the fact that its unit growth rate is accelerating every month?

#BitwiseNEAR质押ETP资产突破1亿美元

$ZEC rose from $16 in 2024 to $1,650—a gain of more than 6,000%. But what I want to say isn’t how much it went up; it’s that its pricing anchor has been changed.

First, let’s lay out the numbers. On September 22, ZEC briefly surged to $1,650.38, up more than 10% in 24 hours. Its market cap was roughly $24.6B to $27.5B, putting it in 9th place by crypto market cap. A year ago, it was still around $48. There are three drivers: (1) On August 25, the first U.S. ZEC spot ETF launched, with an initial issuance of about $304M and later rising by more than $414M, with net inflows for 16 straight trading days; (2) On September 4, when it first broke above $1,000, it came with a short squeeze of about $34.5M, and trading volume surged to $1.2B; (3) The on-chain privacy pool share increased from roughly 8% in earlier years to nearly 30% of the total supply—about 4.9M coins.

My view is that among the three, only the ETF is the real variable. The privacy pool share is a slow-moving factor—this has existed since 2016. Back then, the criticism was that the “privacy feature is just for show,” because most transfers still go through transparent addresses. What truly caused it to be repriced was the emergence of a compliant, institutional-grade exposure—something that institutional accounts can hold. Zcash privacy is optional, so it can be packaged into an ETF wrapper; assets with default anonymity have no such space. In other words, the market isn’t buying privacy itself, but rather “a scarce asset that can fit inside a compliant shell”—it borrows Bitcoin’s 21M-supply cap and halving schedule, with about 78.6% already mined.

Next, what to watch is very specific: whether the ETF’s average daily net inflows can be sustained, and whether the November 5 NU7 upgrade (block production reduced from 75 seconds to 25 seconds) can land on time.

Let me leave you with a question: if you agree that what’s being bought is a scarce compliant exposure—not privacy—then after the EU bans privacy-enhanced coins in July 2027, does this logic still hold? What do you think?

#ZEC breaks through $1600 to set a new high

$MUBARAK 24 Hours saw gains of over 66%; the latest round of data is +68.4%, trading at $0.0749. Just the day before, it broke $0.068 after posting a $157.8 million trading volume. On the surface, it looks like meme madness again—but in terms of the mechanism, it’s actually a rotation from an old ledger (old positions rolling over).

On the same day, other tokens that also rose included $MARSCOIN +34% and $TST +13.7%, while the high-priced old tokens that had led earlier only rose 8%. The leader running behind and the “follower” tokens of the rebound leading—that’s a textbook rotation pattern, not an all-out push. The fuel is also interesting: CZ said in July, “Maybe buy one or two memes,” and it never got fulfilled. Ironically, that unfulfilled expectation became an excuse for continued trading. Meanwhile, BNB rose more than 15% over the same period of seven days. BSC’s 24-hour DEX trading volume briefly surged to $1.33 billion—there’s a real foundation of on-chain heat.

My take is that this rally is driven by existing capital, not new money. Two reasons: first, there’s no new external catalyst for price—it's based on speculation about “who will be bought next.” Second, the gains are concentrated in low-priced old tokens, suggesting the funds are rotating hands rather than expanding positions.

Next, two things to watch: whether MUBARAK’s DEX trading volume can hold at high levels, and whether the earlier leader follows through. If the old tokens keep rising while the leader stays still, it usually means the rotation is reaching its end—because at the very end of a rotation, there’s no new story left to tell.

Memes have no fundamentals—only a distribution (chip) structure. The structure of this wave is: low price, old tokens, and expectation.

Will you chase the old tokens that are lagging behind and catching up, or wait for the earlier leader to pull back?

#MUBARAK24小时涨超66%

On Friday (September 25) at 08:00 UTC, a batch of Bitcoin options with a notional value of about $14.39 billion to $14.73 billion will settle quarterly; including the Ethereum portion, the total is about $16.6 billion, accounting for roughly 40% of the open interest in $BTC options. This is the largest single-day settlement of the year.

The structure is bullish overall: the put/call ratio is about 0.52, meaning call contracts are nearly twice as many as puts. Call positions are concentrated at strike prices of $85,000, $90,000, $100,000, and even $125,000.

What has actually been widely circulated, however, is the "max pain" level. Its algorithm is: group all open contracts by strike price and find the price at which the "largest number of contracts expire worthless." Most institutions place this around $72,000 this time, while the current price is $86,000, about $14,000 higher. So the idea that "settlement will pull the price toward $72,000" has become popular again.

I do not agree. Max pain only has a magnet-like effect when settlement is near and market makers' hedging exposure is highly concentrated around the current price. When the current price is $14,000 above it, the main action of the hedging flow is taking profits, not pulling the price back. More importantly, this magnet was already disproven once in June: the widely touted $72,000 level was never reached then.

So this time, what I care more about is not the price battle before settlement, but what happens after it: at which strike price will open interest rebuild? If the center of rebuilding clearly shifts higher, it means the market is pricing in a higher range; if positions pile up again around the current price, it means everyone is just waiting for direction.

The biggest risk is not the settlement itself, but treating a statistical result as a trading signal.

Before settlement, will you reduce positions over the weekend, or hold and wait for volatility to be released?

#140亿美元比特币期权周五到期

$XRP single-day surge up 8%. The price touched around $1.50, but stretch the timeline: a year ago it was about 58% higher than it is now. Put those two numbers together, and that’s what this trend really looks like.

First, here’s why it’s rising. On the chain side, it’s XRPL’s Batch V1.1 upgrade—grouping up to 8 transactions into an atomic “all-or-nothing” operation, supporting Delivery-versus-Payment (DvP) settlement. Of the 35 tracked validators, 30 have already signaled support (85.71%). If the support rate stays above 80% for 14 days, activation is expected after September 29. On the funds side, spot ETFs have had a continuous 10th week of net inflows, bringing in about $9.5592 million that week, with historical cumulative net inflows of roughly $1.71 billion. On the macro side, Bitcoin’s market dominance has slipped from 64% to 59%, with money rotating from Bitcoin into top-tier altcoins.

My take: this round is the combined force of “leverage plus rotation,” not a fundamental re-pricing. The logic is straightforward—total ETF assets of $1.51 billion only account for 1.71% of XRP’s market cap. That size can’t really carry a valuation. Meanwhile, on September 1, Ripple just unlocked one billion tokens (about $1.38 billion); of those, 200 to 400 million enter circulation. Every month, that structural supply pressure remains in the picture. The only confirmation signal worth watching is this: after the upgrade is activated, can on-chain settlement volume keep up.

So I don’t think this is “XRP making a comeback.” It’s more like “XRP getting traded again.” If you want to judge whether it can hold above $1.50, should you look at on-chain settlement volume or ETF net inflows? #XRP上涨8%