No. 3Friday, 23 October 20266 min read

Starknet's vote to leave Ethereum was carried by 6% of STRK

The token gave back a 186% rally before the poll closed, and futures now equal half its float.

BTC $81,635 -0.5%ETH $2,397 -0.5%SOL $104.23 -0.2%XRP $1.32 -0.9%

Good morning. Bitcoin is $81,635, down 0.5%, and the spot funds turned seller: $635.6m left on 22 Oct after three sessions of inflows above $1.0bn. The lead is Starknet, where a poll backing research into leaving Ethereum closed at 93.52% support and the token fell 34.5% on the week.

The tape

24-hour change: AKE +14.4%, PEPE +10.0%, DOT +6.3%, DASH +5.4%, BNB +1.7%, SOL -0.2%, BTC -0.5%, ETH -0.5%, XRP -0.9%, STRK -6.8% — A flat tape for the majors with large moves at either end. As of 10:05 UTC, 23 Oct 2026.

Bitcoin (BTC) $81,635, -0.5% on the day and -5.0% over 30 days. Ether (ETH) $2,397, -0.5% and -12.3%. Solana (SOL) $104.23, -0.2% and -11.2%. XRP $1.32, -0.9% and -17.4%. BTC's share of all crypto market value is 60.0%; the whole market is $2.72tn, -3.0% in 24 hours.

Gainers: Akedo (AKE), a game publisher, +14.4% after a 26.2% fall; Pepe (PEPE), the largest meme token on Ethereum, +10.0% on $428m of volume; Polkadot (DOT), +6.3%; Dash (DASH), a privacy coin, +5.4%. Losers: Lighter (LIT), a perpetual-futures exchange, -8.3%; THORChain (RUNE), a cross-chain swap network, -8.1%; Starknet (STRK), -6.8%; Monero (XMR), the largest privacy coin, -5.8% after an 8.0% week.

Where to look

Six things today, in order: fund flows turned negative, stablecoin supply still shrinking, leverage against thin floats, funding paying up in XRP, lending the weakest sector, the Fed on 28 Oct.

Seven-day sector performance: Privacy +2.5%, Exchange tokens +0.3%, Memes 0.0%, Layer 1 -1.0%, AI -2.4%, Liquid staking -2.4%, RWA -2.7%, DEX -3.2%, DeFi -4.0%, Layer 2 -4.4%, Lending -6.0% — Lending was the weakest of eleven sectors; privacy the only one meaningfully up. Cap-weighted top 50 per sector. As of 10:20 UTC, 23 Oct 2026.

01
Spot bitcoin funds sold: -$635.6m on 22 Oct, BlackRock's IBIT -$254.1m and Fidelity's FBTC -$217.5m.
That ends three sessions of inflows above $1.0bn, with BTC at $81,635 against the $81,500 the funds paid on average.
WatchA second outflow session with BTC below $81,500.
02
On-chain dollars keep draining: USD Coin (USDC) -$3.19bn over 30 days to $72.0bn, Tether (USDT) -$901m to $182.5bn.
That is $4.09bn in a month, 1.6% of their combined supply, and both shrank again on 22 Oct: USDT is down 0.5% on the month, USDC 4.2%. The drain ran through the funds' buying week, which is why the buying did not lift the price.
WatchUSDC below $72.0bn.
03
Perpetual open interest against market value: Starknet 50.5%, Zcash (ZEC) 17.8%, Pepe 17.6%, bitcoin 4.0%.
STRK carries $198m across 30 venues on a $393m market value; ZEC carries $3.70bn on $20.7bn and traded $10.8bn of perpetuals in 24 hours against $872m of spot. The leverage in both exceeds the tokens that can settle it.
WatchSTRK open interest below $150m.
04
XRP perpetuals pay 0.010% per 8h on Binance, 10.9% annualised; Ether pays 0.000295%, or 0.32%.

The deep dive

Starknet's poll on leaving Ethereum was carried by 457.6m STRK, 6.0% of the 7.59bn tokens in circulation. Starknet (STRK) is an Ethereum layer-2 network, which batches transactions and settles them on Ethereum. The poll, open 15-22 Oct, asked whether to research becoming an independent, quantum-resistant layer-1. 93.52% of the voting power said yes; that was 489.33m STRK across 3,236 votes, 6.45% of the float.

STRK in circulation by how it voted: voted yes 457.6m or 6.0%, voted no or neutral 31.8m or 0.4%, did not vote 7,102.1m or 93.6% — The green slice is the whole mandate. As of 10:05 UTC, 23 Oct 2026.

We divided the final tally by circulating supply from the same pull: 7.10bn STRK, 93.6%, did not vote. The poll is non-binding: no launch date, no bridge design, no change to STRK's economics, with a whitepaper promised in November.

The market settled it first: StarkWare, the company that builds Starknet, proposed the move on 8 Oct, STRK ran from $0.0430 on 3 Oct to $0.1230 on 12 Oct, up 186%, as daily volume went from $45m to $741m. It now trades at $0.0517, 57.9% below that peak. Open interest is $198m against a $393m market value, 50.5%, twelve times bitcoin's ratio and the highest we scanned today.

The objection is sector beta: layer-2 tokens fell 4.4% on the week, STRK fell 34.5%, so 30 points of the move is its own. The fairer objection is a speculative round trip: STRK still trades 20.3% above its 3 Oct price and 22.8% up over 30 days, so the market kept a fifth of the rally. What would prove this wrong: STRK above $0.0430 through the November whitepaper with open interest under a quarter of its float.

The news

Chinese prosecutors asked a court to confiscate 61,896 bitcoin in the Qian case. That is $5.05bn and 0.31% of the 20.10m BTC ever mined, five times what the US spot funds bought in three sessions this week. State seizure is a supply question.
SoFi, a US online bank, launched SOFIE, a tokenized deposit paying 4.40% a year. It is eligible for federal deposit insurance and converts one-for-one into SoFiUSD, the company's own stablecoin, with access rolling out through November. A bank may pay interest on a dollar token; a stablecoin issuer may not.
Ethereum developers cancelled the 26 Oct Glamsterdam upgrade on the Hoodi test network. ChainSecurity, an auditor, found two gas-accounting changes, EIP-8037 and EIP-8038, that let a contract's failure code complete where it used to revert, making a retryable operation permanent. The mainnet date due next week slips.
Aerodrome and Velodrome, two decentralised exchanges, merged into Aero across seven chains. One VELO converts to 0.044 AERO and Aerodrome holders take 94.5% of the new supply, their share of the two exchanges' revenue. Aero targets 12% annual inflation against a 20% ceiling; AERO fell 6% to $0.796 on 22 Oct.
Visa is in late-stage talks to buy the custody firm Fireblocks for about $2.5bn, and Fireblocks denies it. That is 68.8% below the $8bn valuation at which it raised $550m in 2022. Mastercard bought the stablecoin firm BVNK on 3 Aug: card networks are buying this plumbing cheap.

Token talk: Pepe (PEPE)

Price indexed to 100 on 24 September 2026: PEPE 113.9, BTC 96.7, DOGE 86.4 — PEPE ended the month 27 points ahead of Dogecoin. As of 10:05 UTC, 23 Oct 2026.

Pepe (PEPE) is a meme token on Ethereum with no protocol, no fees and no treasury. All 420.69tn tokens were issued at launch in April 2023, all circulate, and none is minted or burned. It earns nothing; its price is pure flow.

It is here because it rose 10.0% on a day the market fell 3.0%: memes were +0.04% over seven days cap-weighted, PEPE +19.9%. We found no announcement behind it.

The numbers: $2.07bn of market value, $428m of 24-hour volume, a turnover of 20.6%, the highest of the large memes. Perpetual futures hold $364m of open interest, 17.6% of market value, and median funding is 0.010% per 8h, 10.9% annualised, the top of the group we scanned. PEPE sits 82.4% below its December 2024 high and 28.9% above its 9 Oct low.

What would change the view: funding under 5% annualised with the price holding, which would mean spot buyers, not leverage. A fall through $0.0000040 takes back the October move.

Token Tape is written by an automated research desk built and supervised by Eric Manoukian. Figures are pulled live each morning and errors are possible. Nothing here is investment advice. The editor may hold positions in assets discussed.

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