Morning Minute is a daily newsletter written by Tyler Warner. The analysis and opinions expressed are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of Decrypt.

Crypto majors rebounded ahead of the 39th anniversary of the 1987 stock market crash, with Bitcoin holding near $82,000 while altcoins and spot ETF flows showed far deeper strain.

Today's top news:

• Crypto majors rebound despite Black Monday fears; BTC at $82k
• Bitcoin ETFs see $228 million in net outflows this past week; ETH ETFs lost $320 million
• Circle plans to expand into 40 emerging market countries
• Papertrade leads onchain protocols in revenue on the week with $30 million
• Trenches index hits “cold” for first time since April

Crypto Rebounds as Black Monday Looms

Thirty-nine years ago today, the Dow fell 22.6% in a single session. Nobody saw it coming, and the notorious “Black Monday” became a fixture of trading history.

Crypto enters that anniversary bruised but not broken. Bitcoin sits at $82,161, down just 1.4% on the week and up about 1% over the last 30 days. That is the good news — and it is nearly the only good news.

Everything else got hit harder. Ethereum fell 5.3% to $2,415. BNB dropped 3.3%, Solana 6.2%, XRP 7.2%, Dogecoin 9.4%, Hyperliquid 8.6% and Zcash 13.2%. Across the majors, the average decline outside Bitcoin was 7.5% — roughly five times what BTC gave up.

Further out, the damage grows uglier. Starknet lost 45% on the week, LayerZero 24%, Pump.fun 22%, Ethena 20%, Fetch 20%, Midnight 19%, Canton 18%, Jupiter 18%, Filecoin 17% and Raydium 18%. The top twelve weekly losers averaged losses of more than 20%, and all of it happened in just seven days.

The ETFs bled out as well. Spot Bitcoin ETFs shed $228.4 million across the week, while Ethereum ETFs lost $320.1 million, for a combined $548.5 million. For October, the two complexes have now bled $1.86 billion. Ethereum's situation is the more fragile one: $14.5 billion in net assets against $12.9 billion of cumulative inflows leaves barely $1.6 billion of cushion before the entire product line is underwater on a mark-to-market basis. Weekly flow tallies, disclosed by the fund issuers, have become one of the most closely watched barometers of institutional demand since spot Bitcoin funds debuted in January 2024.

For context, what turned a bad Friday into Black Monday back then was automated selling feeding automated selling, with no circuit breakers to interrupt it. Equities have those safeguards now, and Korea's Kospi actually tripped one last week. Crypto has none. It trades through the weekend, through the open, through everything — and the market already saw what that looks like on October 10, 2025, when a liquidation cascade repriced the whole market in hours.

In Warner's assessment, the setup today is the opposite of a cascade: a slow bleed, orderly exits, Bitcoin holding while the tail gets cut off — and over the weekend, a modest bid returning across the board. There is broad concern that a “Black Monday” could occur today, which very likely means, in his view, that it will not. Crashes do not happen when everyone is expecting them and ready with cash on the sidelines. The bears may want a Black Monday, but they are very unlikely to get one — at least today. The first checkpoints this week will be the daily ETF flow reports and how the altcoin complex trades through Monday's session.

Macro Crypto and Markets

• Crypto majors are flat on the day but rebounding from a Sunday selloff; BTC even at $82.4k; ETH even at $2,422; SOL +1% at $105; HYPE even at $79; ZEC +1% at $1,146
• Top alt movers include RAY (+8%), ARB (+8%), VVV (+6%) and PEPE (+6%)
• Oil +4% at $101; Gold +0.4% at $4,200
• Stock futures are green after news of an incoming Putin peace summit; DOW -0.1%, Nasdaq +1.1%
• Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley all told third-quarter earnings calls that tokenization — the representation of traditional assets such as stocks, funds or deposits as blockchain tokens — is a growth opportunity rather than a threat, with David Solomon comparing it to the shift to electronic stock trading and Wells Fargo revealing its tokenized-deposit payments system is already in production
• Nine companies including Broadcom, Verizon and UnitedHealth have objected to having their shares traded on the OKX-ICE tokenized stock venue, an early test of the SEC's five-year Innovation Exemption
• Crypto super PAC Fairshake — the largest of the industry's political spending committees — has now spent about $46.66 million trying to keep Sherrod Brown out of the Senate, adding a $5.2 million media buy and a second $1.95 million buy this month in Ohio
• A federal judge refused to let the CFTC walk away from its own $5 million settlement with Gemini, rejecting a joint request from the agency and the exchange to vacate the 2025 consent order and ruling that shifting enforcement priorities and internal misconduct allegations are not enough to undo a deal Gemini signed voluntarily three weeks before trial
• Circle, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, plans to expand into roughly 40 emerging and developing countries, with CEO Jeremy Allaire telling the IMF and World Bank meetings in Bangkok that organic demand across Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa and the Middle East is pulling stablecoins out of the early-adopter phase
• Nine organizations launched the Quantum Alliance, an open standards body modeled on the IETF, the Internet Engineering Task Force behind many of the internet's core standards

Corporate Treasuries & ETFs

• The Bitcoin ETFs saw228 million in net outflows this past week; the ETH ETFs lost $320 million in net outflows

Meme Coin Tracker

• Meme leaders were mixed; DOGE even, SHIB even, PEPE +5%, PENGU +1%, TRUMP -2%, SPX -4%, BONK -1%
• Robinhood chain leaders fell over the weekend; Pons -20% to $176M; AI -30% at $80M; Cashcat -10% at $105M; Orbio +10%, Boner +13% and Torch +78% led top movers
• Solana top movers included Dacity +150%, Weft +550% and Pierre +29x

Token, Airdrop & Protocol Tracker

• Papertrade led onchain protocols in revenue on the week with $30.56M, followed by Hyperliquid at $16.4M and Pump.fun at $14.26M
• BNB Chain burned about 1.646 million BNB worth roughly $1 billion in its 37th quarterly Auto-Burn — the chain's scheduled mechanism for permanently removing BNB from circulation — destroying 1.65% of the token's eventual 100 million supply target in a single quarter
• The unofficial trenches index — an informal sentiment gauge for the memecoin market — hit “cold” for the first time since April, after reaching Euphoric conditions in August–September

What Is Happening in NFTs?

• NFT leaders were mixed; Punks even at 31 ETH, BAYC +6% at 5.6 ETH, Pudgy -2% at 2.4 ETH
• Hypurr (+24%) and Checks (+15%) led top movers