The Crypto Playback Lab
LabLive readings of crypto market structure: how the big regulated players are positioned, how crowded the ETF basis trade is, what regulators and the SEC pipeline are doing, how stretched miners are, which on-chain markets are fragile, where dollar liquidity is flowing, and what the macro backdrop looks like. Built only from free public data and fully documented.
The Playback Read
One look at the whole Lab: how many readings are supportive, neutral or cautionary, where they disagree, and what has changed. It is a simple count, not a blended score.
The read: 1 of 6 readings is supportive, 3 neutral and 2 cautionary. The readings disagree: basis-trade crowding is supportive while macro backdrop and institutional positioning are flashing caution. Stablecoin flows, crowded unwind risk and miner stress are neutral.
- Institutional positioning: Neutral to Caution
- Crowded unwind risk: Caution to Neutral
One bar per day: green supportive, grey neutral, red caution. Record began Oct 8, 2026.
How the Read is built
There is no blended score and no weights. Each indicator with a clear direction is sorted by a fixed threshold: positioning z of +1 or more is Supportive and -1 or less is Caution; basis-trade crowding 55+ is Caution and 20 or less is Supportive; miner stress 70+ is Caution and under 30 is Supportive; macro backdrop 62+ is Supportive and 38 or less is Caution; unwind risk (median of ten markets) 55+ is Caution and under 35 is Supportive; stablecoin supply up 0.5% in a week is Supportive and down 0.5% is Caution. The Regulatory Tracker has no good or bad direction, so it does not vote.
"Caution" means stretched or stressed, not "bearish": miner capitulation, for example, has often clustered near market lows. This summarises the sections below and is not a forecast or financial advice.
The Playback Summary
| Trader type | Long | Short | Net | Net % of OI | Net chg w/w |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Asset managers | 5,174 | 1,642 | +3,532 | +16.5% | -54 |
| Leveraged funds | 5,731 | 12,583 | -6,852 | -32.0% | +4 |
| Dealers | 6,974 | 4,635 | +2,339 | +10.9% | -341 |
Open interest 21,432 contracts. Leveraged funds are usually net short because many run the ETF-versus-futures “basis trade”, so that short is not a bearish bet by itself.
How this score is calculated
Each component is converted to a trailing z-score (how unusual today's reading is versus its own past, never using future data), clipped to ±3, and blended with the weights shown. The blend is the score (z, roughly −2 to +2); the percentile is the normal-curve position of that z (0–100). Regimes: z ≥ +1.0 Bullish Positioning, z ≤ −1.0 Bearish Positioning, otherwise Neutral.
- CME futures positioning (30%): asset managers' net position in CME Bitcoin futures as a share of open interest, from the CFTC's weekly Traders in Financial Futures report (US government data, 2018 onward), z-scored against the trailing two years. A report counts from the Saturday after the Tuesday it describes.
- Spot ETF flows (30%): US spot Bitcoin ETF daily net flow; half 1-day flow, half rolling 5-day sum.
- On-chain perp funding (20%): Hyperliquid BTC perpetual funding per 8 hours (positive means longs pay shorts), z-scored over the past 30 days.
- Perp open interest × price (20%): 24-hour change in Hyperliquid BTC open interest, signed by the 24-hour price direction. Hyperliquid publishes no open-interest history, so this builds from our own hourly snapshots and shows “building” for the first days.
A descriptive gauge of positioning, not a forecast. When a component is still building, the others are re-weighted. CFTC data is weekly, so that component changes once a week; ETF history in the site dataset is short. Coinbase Premium and centralised-exchange funding from the earlier version were removed because there is no clean free source for them. Weights are configurable in scripts/pro/positioning.py.
Since spot Bitcoin ETFs launched, many hedge funds have run the “basis trade”: buy the ETF, short CME Bitcoin futures against it, and collect the gap between the two. It looks like free money, and that is why it can get crowded: if the gap closes, ETF flows turn or margin tightens, every fund heads for the same exit, forcing ETF selling and futures buying at the same time. This reading shows how big and how crowded the futures leg is right now, compared with its own last three years.
How this score is calculated
Data: the CFTC's weekly Traders in Financial Futures report for CME Bitcoin futures (US government data, published Fridays for the prior Tuesday). The crowding score (0–100) is the weighted average of three percentiles against the trailing 156 weeks: Size 40% (leveraged funds' net short as a share of open interest), Absolute size 30% (their net short in contracts, 5 BTC each) and Breadth 30% (how many leveraged-fund traders are short; more funds in the trade is harder to exit). Bands: Low under 35, Moderate 35–55, High 55–75, Extreme 75+. Phase compares the net short with four weeks ago (Building above +5%, Unwinding below −5%). The ETF-capital share divides the dollar net short (at the latest Hyperliquid BTC price) by the cumulative net inflows into US spot Bitcoin ETFs from the site's ETF dataset.
Important limits: the CFTC does not label basis trades. A leveraged-fund short is a proxy, since those funds can short for other reasons; ETFs can also be hedged on other venues or not at all; and the data is weekly. This is a gauge of crowding in the regulated futures leg, not a measurement of the whole trade, and not a forecast.
How much is Washington writing about crypto, and which crypto investment products are moving through the SEC? Public filings, tracked automatically.
| Date | Agency | Type | Title |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-13 | CFTC | Proposed Rule | Regulation Crypto Asset Transactions and Regulation Crypto Asset Markets |
| 2026-10-06 | SEC | Proposed Rule | Adviser and Regulated Fund Custody Rules; Crypto Custody Rules |
| 2026-10-06 | Treasury | Proposed Rule | Requirements for Certain Transactions Involving Convertible Virtual Currency or Digital Assets; Withdrawal |
| 2026-10-06 | Treasury | Proposed Rule | Proposal of Special Measure Regarding Convertible Virtual Currency Mixing, as a Class of Transactions of Primary Money Laundering Concern; Withdrawal |
| 2026-09-30 | Treasury | Rule | Forms and Procedures for Review of State Certifications by the Stablecoin Certification Review Committee |
| 2026-09-29 | Fed | Proposed Rule | Application Procedures for Board-Supervised Insured Depository Institutions Seeking Approval for a Subsidiary To Issue Payment Stablecoins |
| 2026-08-21 | SEC | Proposed Rule | Regulation Crypto Assets |
| 2026-08-18 | Treasury | Proposed Rule | GENIUS Act Regulations on Payment Stablecoin Issuance, Offer, and Sale |
| Product | Asset | Stage | Latest filing | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bitwise NEAR ETFETF / ETP | NEAR | Listing registered | 8-A12B · 2026-09-24 | View filing |
| T. Rowe Price Active Crypto ETFETF / ETP | Multi-asset / other | Listing registered | 424B3 · 2026-09-09 | View filing |
| Morgan Stanley Ethereum TrustETF / ETP | Ether | Listing registered | 424B3 · 2026-07-23 | View filing |
| Morgan Stanley Solana TrustETF / ETP | Solana | Listing registered | 424B3 · 2026-07-23 | View filing |
| Bitwise 10 Crypto Index ETFETF / ETP | Multi-asset / other | Listing registered | 8-A12B · 2026-06-30 | View filing |
| VanEck Solana ETFETF / ETP | Solana | Established, updating | 424B3 · 2026-10-07 | View filing |
| Grayscale Avalanche Staking ETFETF / ETP | Avalanche | Established, updating | 424B3 · 2026-10-06 | View filing |
| iShares Ethereum Trust ETFETF / ETP | Ether | Established, updating | 424B3 · 2026-10-06 | View filing |
| Grayscale Hyperliquid Staking ETFETF / ETP | Hyperliquid | Established, updating | 424B3 · 2026-10-06 | View filing |
| Grayscale Sui Staking ETFETF / ETP | Sui | Established, updating | 424B3 · 2026-10-05 | View filing |
| Grayscale Chainlink Trust ETFETF / ETP | Chainlink | Established, updating | 424B3 · 2026-10-05 | View filing |
| Grayscale CoinDesk Crypto 5 ETFETF / ETP | Multi-asset / other | Established, updating | 424B3 · 2026-10-05 | View filing |
| Grayscale Dogecoin Trust ETFETF / ETP | Dogecoin | Established, updating | 424B3 · 2026-10-05 | View filing |
| Grayscale XRP Trust ETFETF / ETP | XRP | Established, updating | 424B3 · 2026-10-05 | View filing |
| VanEck BNB ETFETF / ETP | BNB | Established, updating | 424B3 · 2026-10-01 | View filing |
| Solana CoOther | Solana | Established, updating | 424B5 · 2026-09-30 | View filing |
How these readings are calculated
Regulatory activity: every Federal Register document (rules, proposed rules, notices) whose text mentions digital assets, crypto assets, cryptocurrency, bitcoin or stablecoins, from the Federal Register's free public API, counted by week. Regulatory heat compares the last four weeks with the average four-week pace of the prior twelve (Rising above +25%, Cooling below −25%, otherwise Steady). The latest-actions list shows rules, proposed rules and notices whose titles are crypto-focused.
ETF pipeline: from the SEC's daily EDGAR filing indexes, crypto-linked S-1, S-1/A, 8-A12B and 424B filings. Because the SEC adopted generic listing standards, most new crypto ETPs no longer need an individual exchange rule filing, so their registration paperwork is the early signal. An 8-A12B is the step that registers the product on an exchange. A filer whose first-ever EDGAR filing is under 90 days old counts as a new product; older filers that file routine prospectus updates are shown as “Established, updating”.
The Federal Register search is a text match, so some documents mention crypto only in passing (counts are mentions, not rulemakings). Filer names are classified by keyword, which is a heuristic. A registration is an intention, not an approval, and nothing here predicts SEC decisions. Both sources are US government public data.
Miners are the network's natural sellers. When margins collapse they switch machines off, and past squeezes have clustered near cycle lows. This tracks how stretched miners are, using open data and 14 years of history.
The read: Margins are squeezed: hashprice sits in the bottom 24% of the last three years and an average-efficiency fleet (loses money at $0.07/kWh); yet hashrate is still growing and the next difficulty adjustment is projected +3.6%, so miners are adding machines rather than capitulating. Over the last 30 days, spot ETF inflows have covered newly mined supply about 1.5x.
| Machine | Break-even power | Margin at $0.07/kWh |
|---|---|---|
| Modern fleet (15 J/TH) | $0.108 | +35% |
| Average fleet (25 J/TH) | $0.065 | -8% |
| Older machines (35 J/TH) | $0.046 | -51% |
Top pool 27% · top three 64% · concentration index (HHI) 1,617 · empty blocks 0.2%
Above 1x means fresh ETF demand more than covers fresh supply. Subsidy only (about 450 BTC a day); ETF data to 2026-10-09.
| Capitulation began | Signal | Days squeezed | +30d | +90d | +180d |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-07-23 | 2026-08-27 | 35 | +5% | … | … |
| 2026-06-09 | 2026-07-22 | 43 | +19% | … | … |
| 2026-05-14 | 2026-06-20 | 10 | +1% | +26% | … |
| 2026-03-28 | 2026-05-11 | 44 | -25% | -21% | … |
| 2026-01-06 | 2026-03-05 | 52 | -5% | -9% | +8% |
| 2025-11-30 | 2026-01-04 | 35 | -17% | -26% | -31% |
| 2025-11-26 | 2025-12-04 | 3 | -2% | -21% | -28% |
| 2025-06-26 | 2025-07-24 | 28 | -3% | -9% | -25% |
| 2025-05-23 | 2025-05-24 | 1 | -2% | +8% | -19% |
| 2025-05-16 | 2025-05-22 | 6 | -8% | +3% | -16% |
40 signals since 2012. After the signal, the median 90-day change was +17% with a 66% hit rate, versus +10% and 60% for an average day: a modest tilt, not a trading edge on its own. Since 2025 (12 signals with a 90-day result) the median was +6%: a weaker showing than the full history. The newest rows are still too young to have 90- or 180-day results.
| Puell band | Days | Median 90d change | Positive |
|---|---|---|---|
| Below 0.6 | 489 | +7.1% | 58% |
| 0.6 to 0.9 | 1,337 | +4.4% | 56% |
| 0.9 to 1.3 | 1,370 | +8.1% | 59% |
| 1.3 to 2 | 1,147 | +16.8% | 62% |
| Above 2 | 690 | +6.1% | 54% |
The classic idea is that a very low Puell multiple marks bottoms. In this data the pattern is weak and uneven: bands overlap in time, and halvings changed the baseline. Useful context, not a signal.
How these readings are calculated
Data: mempool.space's open public API (hashrate since 2009, price since 2010, difficulty adjustments, block rewards and fees, mining-pool shares) and the site's ETF dataset. Hashrate and price are third-party estimates.
Hashprice = block rewards (subsidy + fees, USD) per day ÷ network hashrate in petahashes. Break-even power price = hashprice per terahash ÷ (the machine's joules per terahash × 24 hours ÷ 1,000), for 15, 25 and 35 J/TH; the margin column compares that with a $0.07/kWh reference rate (an assumption, real miners pay anywhere from near zero to well above it). Hash ribbons compare the 30-day and 60-day averages of hashrate: 30 below 60 is capitulation, the cross back up is recovery, and a confirmed signal also needs the 10-day price average above the 20-day. Puell multiple = daily issuance value (subsidy × price) ÷ its 365-day average. Supply absorption = ETF net inflows ÷ the value of coins mined in the same window.
Miner Stress (0–100, higher = more stress) is a percentile blend: hashprice vs its last three years, inverted (35%); the hash-ribbon spread vs three years, inverted (30%); the Puell multiple vs all history, inverted (20%); and the mean of the last three difficulty adjustments vs history, inverted (15%). Bands: Comfortable under 30, Normal 30–50, Under pressure 50–70, Capitulation risk 70+.
The event tables show what happened after past signals; samples are small, windows overlap and the economics of mining have changed (halvings, ETFs, more efficient machines), so treat them as context. Fees before 2023 are not in the hashprice history. Not financial advice.
Bitcoin trades inside a bigger story: how much dollar liquidity the US system is supplying, what real yields are doing, and whether the dollar is firming. This pulls those pieces from Federal Reserve and Treasury data into one backdrop reading.
100 = tailwind for risk assets
The read: US net liquidity is $5.86 trillion, down 1.6% over 13 weeks mostly because of the treasury cash account (-106B effect); real yields are rising and the dollar is steady. The overall backdrop reads headwind.
| Piece | Level | 13-wk change | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fed balance sheet | $6,748B | +12B | +12B |
| Treasury cash account (subtracts) | $880B | +106B | -106B |
| Reverse repo (subtracts) | $2B | -1B | +1B |
Net liquidity = Fed balance sheet minus the Treasury General Account minus the overnight reverse-repo facility. When the Treasury builds its cash balance, it drains liquidity from markets; when it spends, it adds it.
| Driver | Recent | Longer |
|---|---|---|
| US dollar index, daily (90d / 1y) | -0.32 | -0.18 |
| 10-year real yield, daily (90d / 1y) | -0.25 | -0.12 |
| Net liquidity, weekly (1y / 3y) | +0.01 | -0.02 |
A negative number means Bitcoin has tended to fall when the driver rises. The windows are in brackets: first column is the shorter one. Correlations drift and say nothing about cause.
| Liquidity regime | Weeks | Median 13-week return | Positive |
|---|---|---|---|
| Contracting (13-week change below 0) (now) | 292 | +3.3% | 54% |
| Mildly expanding | 129 | +16.6% | 68% |
| Strongly expanding | 128 | +24.4% | 73% |
The pattern leans the expected way: Bitcoin did better after weeks of expanding liquidity. But the windows overlap, there are only a few market cycles, and Bitcoin's own trend dominates, so this is a modest tilt, not a trading edge. The week-to-week correlation above is close to zero: liquidity matters more as a slow backdrop than as a timing tool.
How these readings are calculated
Data: the Federal Reserve and Treasury series republished by FRED (St. Louis Fed): total Fed assets (WALCL), Treasury General Account (WTREGEN), overnight reverse repo (RRPONTSYD), the 10-year TIPS real yield (DFII10) and the broad trade-weighted dollar index (DTWEXBGS); Bitcoin's price from mempool.space. No equity-index series are used.
Net liquidity = Fed assets - Treasury cash account - reverse repo, in billions, on the Fed's weekly (Wednesday) dates. It is a widely used approximation, not an official statistic.
Macro backdrop (0-100, higher = more supportive of risk assets) averages three percentiles against the last ten years: the 13-week change in net liquidity (40%); the 63-trading-day change in the 10-year real yield, inverted (30%); the 63-trading-day change in the dollar index, inverted (30%). Tailwind 62+, Headwind 38 or below, otherwise Mixed.
Fed and Treasury data arrive with a lag, so the newest liquidity week can be several days old. Correlations and the regime table describe the past; they are not forecasts. Not financial advice.
Which large perpetual-futures markets look most crowded and fragile on-chain? Higher scores mean positioning is more stretched and a leveraged unwind would hit harder. Cells show each component's percentile (0–100) against the coin's own last 30 days.
| Asset | Risk score | Direction | Premium | Funding | Open int. | Adverse | Perp vs index | Funding/8h | On-chain OI | 14d |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ETH | 85Extreme | Crowded short | 96 | 86 | 65 | 73 | -5.9 bp | -0.0091% | $2.8B | |
| BTC | 77Extreme | Crowded short | 92 | 97 | 13 | 60 | -5.3 bp | -0.0033% | $3.2B | |
| BNB | 64High | Crowded short | 80 | 73 | 38 | 29 | -4.9 bp | +0.0014% | $44.5M | |
| SUI | 58High | Crowded short | 61 | 62 | 30 | 70 | -4.1 bp | +0.0085% | $68.6M | |
| ADA | 52Moderate | Crowded short | 65 | 47 | 43 | 34 | -4.9 bp | +0.0015% | $39.2M | |
| SOL | 51Moderate | Crowded short | 66 | 45 | 37 | 29 | -4.3 bp | +0.0075% | $625.3M | |
| DOGE | 48Moderate | Crowded short | 62 | 22 | 68 | 31 | -4.0 bp | +0.0100% | $94.9M | |
| XRP | 46Moderate | Crowded short | 70 | 24 | 21 | 34 | -3.9 bp | +0.0100% | $277.5M | |
| LINK | 44Moderate | Crowded short | 36 | 19 | 74 | 78 | -2.7 bp | +0.0100% | $72.8M | |
| AVAX | 28Low | Balanced | 42 | 19 | 1 | 32 | -3.0 bp | +0.0100% | $31.5M |
Open interest is still building: Hyperliquid publishes no open-interest history, so we record our own snapshots. Until about two days have accumulated, the score uses the other three components.
How this score is calculated
Each coin gets a 0–100 score from four components, each a percentile of that coin's own trailing 30 days (so a coin is compared with itself): Premium 45% (how far the perpetual trades from its oracle price, a persistent premium or discount means traders are paying up to hold leveraged positions), Funding excess 25% (funding above or below Hyperliquid's fixed 0.01%-per-8-hours floor, with persistence: raw funding would look falsely elevated because it sits exactly on that floor when the market is balanced), Open interest 15% (current open interest versus its own range, built from our own snapshots) and Adverse move 15% (a 24-hour price move against the crowded side, the stress that forces unwinds). Bands: Low under 35, Moderate 35–55, High 55–75, Extreme 75+. Direction is a vote between the sign of the premium and of the funding excess; a Low score is shown as Balanced.
This map describes traders on Hyperliquid, the largest on-chain perpetuals exchange: a big and fast-moving group, but not the whole market. dYdX, the other on-chain venue checked, is 100–500 times smaller and was left out as noise. Not modelled because free data does not exist: long/short account ratios, liquidation-price clusters, order-book depth, and centralised-exchange crowding.
Is dollar liquidity being created or destroyed, how fast, and where? Net issuance read straight from the blockchains, and where new supply is landing.
| Coin | Supply | Share | 7d | 30d | 7d net |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| USDTTether | $179.5B | 67.3% | +0.16% | +0.44% | +$285.8M |
| USDCUSD Coin | $64.8B | 24.3% | -0.67% | -3.62% | -$380.6M |
| USDSSky USDS | $7.0B | 2.6% | +4.37% | +9.73% | +$293.3M |
| USDeEthena USDe | $4.8B | 1.8% | -2.94% | +5.04% | -$144.1M |
| DAIDai | $4.5B | 1.7% | -1.00% | -0.63% | -$45.9M |
| USD1World Liberty USD1 | $2.8B | 1.1% | -6.00% | -5.08% | -$179.7M |
| PYUSDPayPal USD | $1.8B | 0.7% | +1.13% | +4.20% | +$19.9M |
| RLUSDRipple USD | $1.3B | 0.5% | +2.17% | -5.03% | +$27.7M |
| FDUSDFirst Digital USD | $272.8M | 0.1% | -0.03% | -1.76% | -$92.0K |
| Chain | Supply | Share | 7d net | 30d net |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ethereum | $155.8B | 58.4% | -$696.1M | -$1.7B |
| Tron | $93.4B | 35.0% | +$620.3M | +$1.1B |
| Solana | $8.0B | 3.0% | history building | |
| Base | $4.4B | 1.7% | +$39.6M | +$154.2M |
| Arbitrum | $2.7B | 1.0% | -$142.1K | +$4.8M |
| BSC | $1.4B | 0.5% | -$90.1M | -$94.5M |
| Polygon | $619.3M | 0.2% | -$4.9M | -$180.3M |
| Avalanche | $437.3M | 0.2% | +$15.1M | +$34.9M |
| Optimism | $145.9M | 0.1% | -$7.4M | -$14.8M |
Biggest 7-day movers: Ethereum (-$696.1M), Tron (+$620.3M), BSC (-$90.1M), Base (+$39.6M).
How these readings are calculated
Source: supply is read directly from each token's contract on free public blockchain nodes (Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, Polygon, Optimism, Avalanche, BSC), TronGrid (Tron) and Solana's public RPC. History is rebuilt from archive-node reads (EVM chains) and from the Tether treasury's on-chain transfers (Tron); Solana accumulates from the first run. Net issuance: supply only changes when an issuer mints or burns, so the change in supply is net mint minus burn. For USDT, circulating supply is total supply minus the balance of Tether's treasury wallet (Tether mints unissued tokens to itself), which reconciles to Tether's published liabilities. Bridged or Binance-Peg copies are excluded to avoid double counting. Flow velocity: average daily net issuance over the last 7 days versus the 7 days before. Flow signal: z-score of the latest 7-day change versus the last two months of 7-day changes.
Coverage: the nine largest USD stablecoins on the chains listed (USDT counted on Ethereum and Tron, about 97% of Tether's liabilities). Not covered: smaller chains, non-USD stablecoins, exchange balances and on-chain transfer volume (no free source). "Velocity" here means the speed of net issuance, not payments velocity.
Every number on this page is computed from free public data with no paid vendor and no API key. The formulas are documented beside each indicator.
On-chain perpetuals and futures
Hyperliquid's public info endpoint (funding, premium, open interest, prices) and the CFTC's weekly Traders in Financial Futures report for CME Bitcoin futures (US government data).
Miners and the Bitcoin network
mempool.space's open public API: hashrate and price history, difficulty adjustments, block rewards and fees, and mining-pool shares.
Liquidity and macro
Federal Reserve and Treasury series via FRED (St. Louis Fed): Fed assets, the Treasury General Account, reverse repo, the 10-year real yield and the broad dollar index.
Regulation and the ETF pipeline
The Federal Register's free public API and the SEC's EDGAR daily filing indexes (US government public data).
ETF flows
US spot Bitcoin ETF daily net flows from the site's own ETF dataset (SoSoValue, cross-checked against XOOMAR). Farside Investors was not used because it blocks automated access.
Stablecoins
Token supply read directly from public blockchain nodes (Ethereum and other EVM chains, Tron via TronGrid, Solana), plus Tether's own published transparency figures.