Another skipped week (the Bulletin's ute was in the shop), so here's where we landed. Bitcoin opened the week at its high — $84,262 early Monday — and spent the next three days walking downstairs with a slab of VB on its shoulder, bottoming at $79,676 on Thursday morning before crawling back to close Sunday at $81,960, down a modest 1.34% on the week. CoinGecko's Monday snapshot had it at about $82,200, down roughly 1% on seven days. Ethereum did worse — about $2,409, down 4.8% — and most altcoins did worse again. The whole market was worth about $2.76 trillion with Bitcoin dominance near 59.7%, and the Fear & Greed Index read 59: still technically "Greed", but down from 69 a week earlier. The money left by the front door, too: US spot Bitcoin ETFs saw about $228 million of net outflows for 12–16 October, and spot Ether ETFs lost about $320 million. When the Ether funds bleed faster than the Bitcoin funds, the big end of town is telling you which one it trusts less right now.
The villain this week was inflation. Remember last issue, when a terrible jobs report made markets cheer because it made another rate hike less likely? This week undid it. US consumer prices rose 0.6% in September, putting annual CPI at 3.7% (forecasters expected 3.6%), and wholesale prices (PPI) jumped 1.3% in a month — the biggest monthly rise since March 2022. The 10-year Treasury yield closed Thursday at 5.10%, oil sat above $100 a barrel, and New York Fed boss John Williams said one more hike this year is possible. Then Asia's chip stocks fell over: South Korea's Kospi dropped 7.57% on Thursday and tripped a circuit breaker, Japan's Nikkei lost 4.9%, and that was the morning Bitcoin hit its low. The Fed meets on 27–28 October. Crypto isn't a separate planet, folks — when the grown-up markets catch a cold, we cough too.
Seven-day moves among the top 150 coins by market cap, CoinGecko snapshot taken Monday 19 October. I've left out anything trading under about $10 million a day — Pearl (PRL) was up 29.01% but on roughly $4.8 million of volume, which is a puddle, not a market. A red week means a short list of green:
| # | Coin | Price | Move | Poida's take |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Q (Quack AI) | $0.1259 | +307.11% | Quadrupled in a week and printed a fresh all-time high on Monday, and I couldn't find a news story that explains it. When nobody can tell you why it went up, nobody can tell you when it stops. Chapter 3. Two per cent. I'm begging ya. |
| 2 | AKE (Akedo) | $0.02963 | +23.79% | No confirmed news behind it either, and it's still about 80% under the all-time high it set only a month ago. Up 24% and still 80% down is not a comeback, it's a bounce off the floor. |
| 3 | BTW (Bitway) | $1.93 | +11.78% | Loser #3 in issue #7, winner #3 this time. Hit a new high near $2.70–2.77 midweek, then dropped about 20% in the last 24 hours of the snapshot. A seven-week run with a rollercoaster bolted on the end. |
| 4 | XMR (Monero) | $595.83 | +11.75% | The privacy coin broke above $565 and kept going while Bitcoin went backwards. Still about 25% under its January high. Privacy coins keep turning up on these tables — up and down — so watch the regulators as closely as the chart. |
| 5 | INJ (Injective) | $8.49 | +8.04% | 21Shares filed for an Injective ETF that would hold and stake the token. A filing is a form, not an approval — and INJ is still about 84% below its 2024 high. |
Same snapshot, same top 150, bottom of the ladder, same $10-million-a-day volume filter — MemeCore (M) technically fell further, −29.81%, but on about $1.8 million of volume. Two of issue #7's winners are on this list. Again. Stops, people (Chapter 4):
| # | Coin | Price | Move | Poida's take |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | STRK (Starknet) | $0.0583 | −44.20% | Winner #2 in issue #7 at $0.0584. Two weeks later: $0.0583. It went up a lot and then came all the way back down, and anyone who bought the top paid for the round trip. About 99% under its all-time high, still. |
| 2 | GRASS (Grass) | $0.5951 | −23.70% | No specific news found — it went down with the other AI-themed tokens (FET fell 18% too). About 85% below its high. Grass, mowed. |
| 3 | ZRO (LayerZero) | $1.84 | −21.84% | The cross-chain messaging token keeps releasing new supply — chart-watchers point to monthly unlocks of around 23 million tokens running through 2027. More tokens arriving every month is a headwind, whatever the tech does. |
| 4 | PUMP (Pump.fun) | $0.00447 | −18.99% | Winner #3 in issue #7 at +27%. The house still wins at the casino; the house's token, not so much this week. |
| 5 | PYTH (Pyth Network) | $0.0730 | −18.56% | An oracle network — the same job as Chainlink on our Value Shelf — down about 94% from its high. Just behind it at −18.12%: Ethena (ENA), loser #5 in issue #7. Some coins just like it down here. |
Not tips. Not targets. Just three established, heavily-used networks trading a long way below their old highs — the kind of thing a Chapter 6 DCA-and-hold Boganster researches while everyone else chases this week's 307%. Same three as issue #7, and all three are cheaper than they were two weeks ago — which is exactly why the rule says what it says. Do your own research, size by the 2% rule, and remember: cheap can always get cheaper.
About 51% below its all-time high of $4,946 (August 2025), down from 45% below in issue #7. On the building side, the Glamsterdam upgrade has reached its last planned testnet: it goes live on the Hoodi testnet on 26 October and lifts the gas limit from 60 million to 200 million — roughly 3.3 times the room per block — with no mainnet date yet. Issue #7's usage numbers (more than 35% of all ETH staked, DeFi deposits recovering) were from early October. The honest counterpoint is louder this time: spot Ether ETFs lost about $542 million in the week to 9 October (BlackRock's fund alone about $477 million) and another $320 million this week, with October's total reported at around $900 million out. The network keeps getting upgraded; the big buyers are heading for the door. Those two things can stay true at the same time for a long while.
About 64% below its all-time high of $293.31, and lower than the ~$120 in issue #7. The usage is still there: Q3 numbers out this week show application revenue up 48% on Q2 to about $299 million, and on 19 October the network was running about 2.22 million active addresses and roughly $1.44 billion of daily DEX trading, with about $15.5 billion of stablecoins sitting on it. The Alpenglow consensus upgrade, which aims to cut confirmation times sharply, is reported for 21 October. The counterpoints: US spot Solana ETFs saw withdrawals in ten straight sessions to 16 October, and one analyst classed 58% of a month's DEX volume as circular or bot-like. Busy isn't always the same as useful — that's the bit worth digging into.
About 77% below its all-time high near $52.70, down from ~$14.11 in issue #7. The plumbing kept getting laid this week: Chainlink's data feeds went live on Stellar, which hosts more than $4 billion of tokenised real-world assets, and the Chainlink Reserve added about 89,200 LINK on 15 October to hold roughly 6.29 million — about 0.82% of circulating supply, bought with network revenue. And the price still fell — to an $11.81 low that same day — because, as one analysis put it, daily trading volume dwarfs those reserve purchases, and about 23% of the maximum supply still isn't circulating. US spot Chainlink ETFs also saw small net outflows on 16 October, and the 50 biggest wallets hold about 51.9% of supply (exchanges and staking pools included). A network being used and a token going up are two different stories. A watchlist entry, not a conclusion.
Market data: CoinGecko — prices, seven-day moves, all-time highs, market cap and dominance (snapshot Monday 19 October 2026) · Alternative.me — Crypto Fear & Greed Index. News & context: Bitcoin News Digest — 18 October 2026 (weekly range, ETF flows, CPI/PPI, Kospi, Strategy) · Crypto Briefing — Ether ETFs lose $320M in a week · KuCoin Square — Bitcoin & Ethereum weekly review · Bitcoin.com — This Week in Crypto Law, 18 October 2026 · CryptoTicker — crypto ETF outflows pass $1 billion in October (week to 9 October). Winners & losers: CoinGecko — gainers & losers · FXStreet — top 7 crypto gainers this week: Celestia, Bitway, Injective · AMBCrypto — weekly winners and losers, 18 October · TradingView ideas — LayerZero unlock schedule. Value Shelf: CoinMarketCap — Ethereum latest updates (Glamsterdam on Hoodi) · CoinCentral — Solana bounces to $105 (ETF flows, on-chain activity) · Blockonomi — Solana statistics 2026: Q3 revenue and network growth · ad-hoc-news — Alpenglow set for 21 October · CoinMarketCap — Chainlink latest updates · KuCoin News — Chainlink Reserve accumulates 6.29M LINK · 24/7 Wall St — Chainlink keeps buying its own token. Why is LINK still down?. Prices are snapshots and move constantly.
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