A chart shows bitcoin exchange inflows jumping to two or three times their normal daily level, and the caption says “sell pressure incoming.” Sometimes that is roughly what happens. Often it is not, because an inflow total adds together very different kinds of deposits: a long-term holder sending coins to sell, a trader topping up … Read more
Here is a calculation that changes how most people read miner charts. Suppose miners send out exactly the same number of bitcoin every day for a year. If the price doubles over that year, a USD-based “miner outflow multiple” will show miners distributing far more than usual, even though they did not move a single … Read more
Most evenings, someone posts a headline like “Spot bitcoin ETFs see $500 million in inflows.” It sounds like a direct measure of institutions buying bitcoin. It is partly that, and partly something else. To use flow data well you need to know where the number comes from, when it arrives, and what it cannot tell … Read more
Here is a puzzle worth solving before you ever draw a trendline on a stablecoin dominance chart. Suppose not a single new stablecoin is minted and none are redeemed, yet stablecoin dominance rises from 10.0% to 12.2% in a week. Did traders “flee to stablecoins”? Not necessarily. Nothing about stablecoins changed at all. The rest … Read more
Before a large Bitcoin options expiry, you will see headlines like “max pain sits at $100,000.” The number sounds like a forecast. It is not. It is the output of a simple calculation on open interest, and once you have done that calculation by hand you will know exactly what it measures, what it ignores, … Read more
An alert pops up: “2,000 BTC transferred from unknown wallet to Exchange X.” Replies fill up with “dump incoming.” Before you react, it helps to know that an alert like this contains two very different kinds of information. The amount and the time are facts recorded on the blockchain. The words “unknown wallet” and “Exchange … Read more
Your dashboard says Bitcoin futures open interest jumped 5% in a few hours. Did thousands of new traders just pile in? Maybe. Or maybe not a single new position was opened and the price simply went up 5%. Before you can read an open interest (OI) spike, you need to know which of those happened. … Read more
You open a $40,000 long on a BTC perpetual with $4,000 of margin. The funding rate shows 0.0100%. That looks like nothing. Hold the position for a month and you will have paid about $360, or 9% of your margin, before the trade has done anything. If the rate climbs to 0.0500% during a hot … Read more
The most common misreading of a liquidation heatmap is treating the bright yellow band as a wall of real orders sitting at that price. It is not. No exchange publishes the liquidation prices of other traders’ positions. Every heatmap you see on a data site is a model’s guess, built from public data plus assumptions … Read more
