I want to talk about a number that deserved more attention this week than it got: one zettahash per second. Bitcoin's seven‑day average hashrate crossed that line for the first time since March 3, and it did so while the biggest public miners were busy handing their machines over to artificial intelligence. Odd, right? It's also the best place to start this crypto market recap, because much of what moved in the last 24 hours comes down to who is paying for what, and what it costs.
Prices bounced, Ethereum's next upgrade slipped, and Beijing put a date on a very large blockchain project. Here's the rundown, with my read on which items matter.
Miners Are Leaving for AI, and Hashrate Climbed Anyway
The numbers look contradictory at first. BlocksBridge Consulting says publicly traded miners saw realized hashrate fall 23% as they pointed machines and power contracts at AI work, as Cointelegraph reported. Their AI revenue rose 52% quarter over quarter. The consultancy puts the mining gear displaced by the shift at about $1.5 billion.
Still, the network got stronger. Difficulty rose 5.92% on Oct. 16, and BlocksBridge projects another 5.16% at the next adjustment. Stack those and you get roughly 11.4% over two rounds, which makes every block harder to win.
So who filled the gap? My guess is smaller operators. If big firms are walking away from rigs, those rigs land somewhere, and a miner with cheap electricity can make old hardware pay when a listed company can't be bothered. That's an inference, and BlocksBridge frames it as a possibility rather than a count. It fits, though.
If you hold Bitcoin, this is mildly reassuring: the security budget doesn't drain just because the headline miners found a shinier business. If you mine, it's a squeeze. More competition, higher difficulty, and no extra price boost guaranteed.
Ethereum Hits Pause on Glamsterdam
The Hoodi testnet fork for Glamsterdam was due on Oct. 26. It's now postponed. The Ethereum Foundation said developers need more time to study how certain proposals interact with contracts already live on the network.
The trigger was an Oct. 13 warning from security firm ChainSecurity. It flagged two Glamsterdam proposals, EIP‑8037 and EIP‑8038, as potentially weakening defenses against insufficient gas griefing. That's an attack where someone supplies just enough gas for a call to fail in a way that hurts the contract on the other end. The worry is existing contracts that handle failed transactions.
Nobody has offered a new date, and that matters. Developers had been eyeing early December for mainnet, with a schedule to be locked after a clean Hoodi run. No clean run, no schedule. I wouldn't call this a crisis, since finding this stuff is the whole point of a testnet. But December now looks like a stretch, and traders who priced in an upgrade catalyst should hold that loosely.
Beijing Sets a 2030 Finish Line
China's Central Cyberspace Affairs Commission, a senior Communist Party body that coordinates digital policy, put out its informatization blueprint for the coming five‑year period on Friday. Under it, the country's national blockchain network is supposed to be largely finished by 2030.
It names regions. The Yangtze River Delta gets deeper blockchain use in trade and finance, and the Chengdu‑Chongqing area in the southwest is slated for large‑scale deployment in manufacturing and agriculture. The goal itself isn't new. It was already in the national development plan released in March, and a joint policy from party leadership and the State Council on Oct. 9 called for building it. The explicit deadline is what's new.
No token you can buy gets a bullish catalyst out of this. It's infrastructure policy, and it sits apart from public chains. But it tells you that blockchain as plumbing for government and industry is a settled priority in the world's second‑largest economy, which is worth knowing even if your portfolio never touches it.
Oil and Bond Yields Still Write the Price Story
Now the price action, where I'll spend the most time, because the story here is less about crypto than about what's happening around it.
Bitcoin touched a weekly high on Wednesday, trading near $84,500, up about 2.5% on the day, as Decrypt reported. That recovered ground lost in a slide earlier this month that took it below $80,000, with October's low near $79,711. Ether rose to about $2,504, Solana to $108.18, BNB to $749. XRP led the large caps at $1.37, and Zcash jumped 11.2% to $1,332. Total market value sat somewhere between $2.8 and $2.9 trillion, depending on the tracker.
By Friday the bounce had cooled. Live tickers had Bitcoin back around $80,700, Ether near $2,378 and Solana near $102. Call it a round trip.
Oil Matters to Your Coins More Than You Think
October's selloff has a clear set of suspects. Brent crude has swung between $97 and $112 this month and sat near $108 midweek, with the war involving Iran keeping supply fears alive. Pricier oil leaks into everything else. The September U.S. consumer price index showed inflation at 3.7% year over year. Economists had penciled in 3.6%, and August's reading was 3.4%, so the surprise came on top of an already rising trend.
Inflation pushes Treasury yields up, and the 10‑year hit 5.09%. When Washington pays you better than 5% with almost no default risk, speculative assets have to work harder to earn a place in your portfolio. Leveraged traders feel it too, since borrowing gets pricier.
After its September hike, the Federal Reserve's policy rate stands in a band from 3.75% up to 4%. CME FedWatch puts the odds of leaving rates alone at the Oct. 28 meeting near eighty percent, yet traders are betting heavily that the Fed raises again on Dec. 9. That's the real pressure point. A hold next week won't feel like relief if the next move is up.
Bitcoin Is Bouncing, Not Breaking Out
The chart still has an uptrend's shape. The 200‑day average, about $76,084, trails below the 50‑day exponential average at roughly $80,782, and price has been hovering right around that shorter line. RSI read 58.5 on Wednesday, so buyers had the edge without the market looking stretched. The Crypto Fear & Greed Index was 55, neutral and three points better than the day before. Traders had stopped panicking. They hadn't started chasing.
The levels are simple enough. Bitcoin has been boxed between roughly $79,700 and $87,400 since late September. Bulls need a daily close above $84,726 to make a case, with $86,090 and then the September high of $87,422.70 as targets. Bears are looking at $81,603, a support that broke in October and was reclaimed. Lose it again and the 50‑day average, the October low and the 200‑day come into play.
Prediction markets are lukewarm. On Myriad, a platform built by Decrypt's parent company Dastan, the odds of Bitcoin touching $87,500 this month have dropped to 31%, from 45% on Oct. 12. Traders give a $90,000 touch only 18%.
My own view: with Bitcoin back near the bottom of the $79,700 to $87,400 range, the market is rhyming with September. A range doesn't resolve on enthusiasm. It resolves when oil or yields give way, and neither has.
The Meme Coin Born in a Video Game Trailer
Meanwhile, the weirdest story of the day. The launch trailer for Grand Theft Auto 6 briefly shows a plane covered in branding for something called Dacity Coin, and a leaked mission reportedly has the protagonist, Lucia, performing a parachute stunt to attract investors to it. Decrypt reported that traders spun up an unofficial Solana token with the same name and pushed it to a peak market cap of $15 million.
There is no official tie to the game, and Rockstar didn't respond to Decrypt's request for comment. Some traders think the coin is a side‑mission gag. Others imagine a tradable in‑game asset, like the stocks players could buy in GTA V. One trader showed unrealized gains of $285,000 on a $20,000 stake, per Pump.fun data cited in the report. Unrealized is the operative word.
I'd treat this as a sentiment gauge, not a thesis. Speculators will bet on anything with a release date attached, and GTA 6 lands in November. Whatever the game does with Dacity, I suspect the real token's fate gets settled the day players see it.
Three Dates and Two Price Levels Will Decide the Next Few Weeks
The Fed meets Oct. 28. A hold is the base case, but the tone around a December hike will move Bitcoin more than the decision itself. Ethereum developers owe the community a new Hoodi date for Glamsterdam, and until one appears, mainnet in December is a hope rather than a plan. The next Bitcoin difficulty adjustment will show whether the smaller miners really are absorbing the slack from that zettahash story.
On the chart, the two numbers are $84,726 and $81,603. I expect a close beyond either one to say more about what comes next than any headline above.
