The Week in Data, Sep 21 to 27: Bitcoin Gains 4% in One Monday as the 10-Year Hits 5.17%

Bitcoin finished the week of Sep 21 to 27 up 4.0%, and the entire gain arrived before Tuesday. Kraken's Monday candle ran from $81,164 to $86,593.80, a 6.7% session, on the day spot bitcoin ETFs took in $999 million. Over the six sessions that followed, BTC gave back 2.5% to close Sunday at $84,444.20.

The reason the rally stopped is in the bond market. The 10-year Treasury yield sat at 4.96% Monday and Tuesday, then jumped to 5.11% Wednesday and 5.18% Thursday. Every risk asset on the dashboard went sideways while the long end repriced.

Markets

Kraken daily candles, Monday to Sunday UTC:

Asset	Week open	Week close	High	Low	Change
BTC	$81,164.00	$84,444.20	$87,446.70	$80,839.50	+4.0%
ETH	$2,644.67	$2,688.02	$2,806.69	$2,627.68	+1.6%
SOL	$111.15	$121.98	$124.91	$110.69	+9.7%

All three highs landed on Monday or Tuesday, all three lows in Monday's first hours.

Monday was bitcoin's highest trade since January, per TechTimes, which put the intraday peak at $87,397. CoinReporter, citing Farside Investors data, reported $999 million of net spot bitcoin ETF creations that day, the largest of 2026. Then the bid decayed in a straight line: $715 million Tuesday, $347 million Wednesday, $191 million Thursday, $135 million Friday.

The week still totalled about $2.4 billion, the strongest since October 2025, enough to flip 2026 net flows positive at roughly $934 million after the funds sat $5.8 billion underwater in mid July. The money kept arriving after price failed $87,000, just less each day. Our bitcoin page tracks the price side.

Solana led at +9.7% on its own drivers. CoinCentral reported SOL at $120.86 on Sep 25, its first print above $120 since January 29, with US spot Solana ETF assets near $1.81 billion. Its Alpenglow upgrade, targeting roughly 150 millisecond settlement against the current 12.8 seconds, went live on both public test networks. The SOL page has the live quote.

Sentiment barely moved. The Crypto Fear and Greed Index from Alternative.me read 70, 78, 71, 71, 71, 74 and 70 from Monday to Sunday. Tuesday's 78 was the only Extreme Greed print; the week opened and closed on the same 70. The latest reading is 74.

US equities kept the crypto pattern. SPY closed Friday at $771.35, up 1.27% on the week; QQQ closed at $744.50, up 3.20%. Monday again did most of it, QQQ adding 2.78% in that session alone. TheStreet and CNBC attributed the opening rally to an AI and semiconductor bid, falling oil on hopes of renewed US and Iran talks, and Treasury yields retreating.

Yields did not stay retreated. The Treasury's par yield curve, Sep 25 against Sep 18:

Tenor	Sep 18	Sep 25	Change
2-year	4.76%	4.81%	+5 bps
10-year	5.01%	5.17%	+16 bps
30-year	5.34%	5.49%	+15 bps

The 2s10s spread widened from 25 to 36 basis points, steepening as the long end did the selling. CNBC reported the move followed surprisingly strong purchasing managers indices, a week after the Fed began raising its policy rate, with Governor Michael Barr saying Wednesday that more increases would likely be needed. It called Thursday's levels the highest since June 2007. Our treasury yield explainer reads the curve.

Positioning

Hyperliquid perpetuals held $12.85 billion of open interest across 178 markets at the time of writing, down 1.59% over 24 hours. Bitcoin was the largest book at $3.08 billion, or 36,949 BTC, down 3.68% on the day; ether followed at $2.97 billion, or 1.11 million ETH, roughly flat. Hourly funding on both read 0.00125%, the neutral baseline: nobody was paying up to be positioned. The feed keeps about 26 hours of history, so these are levels, not weekly changes.

ETH/BTC fell 2.3% over the week, from 0.0326 at Monday's open to 0.0318 on Sunday on Kraken closes, as bitcoin's 4.0% beat ether's 1.6%. On Hyperliquid it read 0.0322 at the time of writing.

Prediction markets

Polymarket's rate markets did the week's most decisive repricing. Odds and one-week changes are as Polymarket reported them at the time of writing, by weekly volume, sports and near-certainties aside:

Market	Yes	1-week change	1-week volume
No Fed change at the October meeting	32.5%	-16.0 pts	$1.74M
Fed raises 25 bps in December	78.0%	+10.5 pts	$247K
Bitcoin reaches $92,500 in September	0.9%	-22.9 pts	$429K
Bitcoin dips to $80,000 in September	16.4%	-15.4 pts	$404K
Bitcoin reaches $130,000 by Dec 31	6.2%	-0.1 pts	$405K

Read the top two rows together: traders cut the odds of an October hold by 16 points and raised a December quarter-point hike by 10.5, in the same week the 10-year added 16 basis points. Three feeds, one story.

The bitcoin rows show a range collapsing from both ends as September runs out: the $92,500 upside priced under 1% after a 23 point drop, the $80,000 downside down 15 points to 16.4%. Both settle Oct 1. Here is how to read these odds.

The planet

USGS counted 113 earthquakes of M4.5 or greater between Sep 21 and Sep 27 UTC. Five reached M5.5 and one reached M6: an M6.6 on Sep 25 at 21:23 UTC, 80 km ENE of Tadine, New Caledonia, 10 km deep, green PAGER alert, no tsunami flag. It brought a sequence in the same water: M5.5 at 23:39 that night, M5.4 at 23:52, M5.3 the next morning. Elsewhere an M5.7 struck near Tonga on Sep 23 and an M5.6 near Kokopo, Papua New Guinea. Nothing rated above green.

GDACS listed 264 alerts, 255 green and nine orange, no red. Two orange alerts opened inside the week: tropical cyclone ONE-26, flagged for India from Sep 22 to 24 with 10.25 million people inside tropical storm force winds, and POLO-26 off Mexico from Sep 21, with 225,000 exposed to Category 1 winds or higher. The other seven are droughts and floods opened months ago, still listed but not this week's news.

On volcanoes, an honest gap: the Smithsonian and USGS Weekly Volcanic Activity Report had no bulletin covering our window at the time of writing, its newest item still running Sep 10 to 16. GDACS did log an ongoing eruption at Etna, Italy dated Sep 27, at green.

Space

Four orbital launches flew inside the window, per The Space Devs, all four successful:

Sep 23, 13:32 UTC. CASC Long March 8A from Wenchang, SatNet LEO Group 26.
Sep 24, 08:46 UTC. CASC Long March 6A from Taiyuan, Yaogan 40 Group 04.
Sep 26, 00:39 UTC. Rocket Lab Electron from Mahia, StriX Launch 13.
Sep 26, 14:00 UTC. SpaceX Falcon 9 from Vandenberg, USSF-385.

One Falcon 9 in seven days is quiet by 2026 standards. China flew as many orbital missions as the US.

The internet

Cloudflare opened 27 incidents on its status page between Sep 21 and 27, 24 rated minor and three rated none. Two were still at "identified" at the time of writing: network performance degradation in Asia-Pacific, and Cloudflare One clients wrongly challenged on some sites.

GitHub logged two, the longer being "Incident across several services", Sep 23 at 10:11 UTC to Sep 24 at 04:55 UTC, about 18 hours at minor impact as published. OpenAI logged six, including the week's only critical rating, "Issues with Codex" on Sep 25, open 56 minutes. Claude's page logged one rated major, elevated errors across models on Sep 22, open 98 minutes.

On our side of the wire, 114 of 116 feeds checked were live at the time of writing, two idle, none stalled or dark. The status board showed Cloudflare at minor service outage and Zoom partially degraded, the other eleven providers operational.

The week ahead

Wednesday Sep 30, 8:30 ET. BEA Personal Income and Outlays for August, carrying the PCE price index, plus the third estimate of Q2 GDP.
Friday Oct 2, 8:30 ET. The BLS Employment Situation for September, the last jobs report before the October FOMC.
Thursday Oct 1. SpaceX is scheduled to fly Crew-13 to the ISS from Cape Canaveral at 15:10 UTC, and Transporter 18 from Vandenberg at 18:18 UTC.
Friday Oct 2, 03:53 UTC. A Falcon Heavy is set to lift NROL-97 from Kennedy Space Center.
Thursday Oct 1, 04:00 UTC. Polymarket's September bitcoin questions settle.
Further out, the FOMC's next decision is Oct 27 to 28, per the Fed's calendar. Every print above feeds into it.

One more was already in progress: The Space Devs listed Starship Flight 14, with Starlink Group 31-1, as in flight from Starbase at 12:48 UTC on Monday.