Bitcoin’s early-October selling pressure eased in Glassnode’s latest completed weekly snapshot, but the improvement did not come with a convincing return of spot buyers. Its October 19 Market Pulse, covering the week to October 18, describes a market in which reduced selling and renewed buying remain separate questions.
TL;DR: Perpetual-futures selling moderated, yet spot trading still favoured aggressive sellers. These are dated weekly observations, not a live reading of Saturday’s market.
Less Selling Does Not Mean Net Buying
Glassnode put perpetual cumulative volume delta at negative $562.7 million, compared with negative $891.1 million a week earlier. Spot cumulative volume delta moved the other way, from negative $67 million to negative $83.6 million. Spot turnover was broadly stable at about $5.5 billion.
The combination is important: the derivatives measure became less negative while the spot measure became more negative. Treating both changes as evidence of broad accumulation would miss that distinction.
Glassnode’s metric documentation defines cumulative volume delta through the difference between buyer-initiated and seller-initiated trades. A seller accepting an available bid contributes differently from a buyer lifting an offer. The measure concerns which side crosses the spread, rather than a claim that trades have sellers but no buyers.
Consequently, a negative reading can coexist with steady overall turnover. Volume measures how much changes hands; order-flow direction describes the balance of aggressive execution. Reading the two together is more informative than treating a large turnover figure as automatic evidence of bullish demand.
Open Interest Needs A Directional Cross-Check
The same weekly report recorded futures open interest of $36.4 billion, down only slightly from $36.5 billion. Long-side funding payments increased from $1.1 million to $1.6 million. Those numbers suggest derivatives positions remained substantial even as aggressive selling moderated.
Open interest itself does not identify a market’s net bullish conviction. CME’s definition counts contracts that remain open, with each contract having both a buyer and a seller. A large total can include outright speculation, hedges and offsetting strategies. Assigning all of it to bullish investors would overstate what the statistic reveals.
This creates a useful test for subsequent market reports. Stronger price action accompanied by improving spot order flow would tell a different story from a move driven mainly by changing leveraged positions. Conversely, weaker spot execution alongside persistent open interest would leave the demand picture unresolved.
The dates also matter. A report covering the week to October 18 cannot confirm what investors did during the following Thursday’s or Friday’s trading. Its value is as a documented starting point: it identifies the demand weakness that later data must either corroborate or overturn.
Written by the News Desk and edited by Samuel Rae.