Markets · Oct 20, 2026

Can XBT's market absorb the unlock? Liquidity by the numbers

By xbt.live · 4 minute read

Chart of unlocking XBT versus buy orders

About 20,260 XBT of mining rewards become spendable at block 979,920, around Oct 31 to Nov 1. We pulled every public order book that trades XBT tonight. All of them together hold buy orders for about 163 XBT within 10% of the current price, and about 1,107 XBT within 50%. That's roughly 5% of what unlocks.

Bar chart: 20,260 XBT unlocking, compared with 1,866 XBT of daily volume and buy orders of 163 XBT within 10%, 547 XBT within 20% and 1,107 XBT within 50% of the price

The numbers

	XBT	About
Rewards that unlock at 979,920	~20,260	$11.4M
Traded on all exchanges, last 24 hours	1,866	$1.10M
Buy orders within 2% of the price	5	$3,000
Buy orders within 10%	163	$87,000
Buy orders within 20%	547	$276,000
Buy orders within 50%	1,107	$465,000

Price was about $561 at block 978,252. Dollar figures for buy orders use the average price you'd get walking down the book.

Exchange by exchange

Depth chart: XBT buy orders on each order book as the price falls from 0% to 50%. NeoxEX's XBT/BTC book holds the most, then XBT/USDC

Order book	24h volume	Spread	Bids within 10%	Within 50%
NonKYC XBT/USDT	1,114 XBT	0.46%	5.5 XBT	38 XBT
NeoxEX XBT/BTC	401 XBT	0.75%	116 XBT	801 XBT
NeoxEX XBT/USDC	344 XBT	0.16%	40 XBT	244 XBT
NeoxEX XBT/USDT	8 XBT	0.96%	1 XBT	24 XBT

NonKYC trades the most but holds the least. It did 60% of the day's volume with only about 5.5 XBT of bids within 10%. Orders there come and go fast, so the resting book understates what trades in a day.
NeoxEX's bitcoin pair holds the most. About 116 XBT of bids sit within 10%, priced in BTC.
The tightest market is NeoxEX XBT/USDC, with a 0.16% spread.
All books also carry huge bids at a tiny fraction of a cent. We left those out: they only fill in a collapse.

Why it won't all hit the books at once

Moved isn't sold. Pools pay out to miners, and many miners hold. Who can sell
It's concentrated. Of the 15,052 locked XBT our tracker has counted so far, AlphaPool mined 4,500 and Lazarus 3,537. Two pools' payout decisions matter more than anything else.
Relay slows it down. Knots nodes only relay spends of rewards at least 6,480 blocks old. Pools that mine their own blocks can skip that. Why it's a cliff
It might not happen. Five proposals would change the lock; none is released yet. The five options
Books refill. Resting orders are a snapshot. Buyers add bids as price drops, and over-the-counter deals and Roblosats don't show up in order books at all.

What to watch

We'll rerun these numbers the day after the unlock and track every locked reward that moves, block by block, on the unlock tracker and the Lock Pressure chart. If you sell, split large orders and check the book first. Market sell orders on thin books get bad prices.

Unlock tracker Compare exchanges

Method: public order books from NonKYC (BTCB2/USDT) and NeoxEX (BTCB2/USDC, BTCB2/BTC, BTCB2/USDT) pulled Oct 21, 2026 at about 02:35 UTC, block 978,252. Depth is measured from each book's mid price; the BTC pair is measured in BTC terms. Volume from xbt.live's exchange feed. Locked total is the tracker's count at block 978,252 plus 1,667 remaining blocks at 3.125 XBT. Order books change by the minute. Not financial advice.

Have an XBT story? Write for xbt.live.

Life support

So the patient was moved to the emergency room. In August, the SHA-256 miners left on their own chain, and the nodes enforcing BIP-110's rules kept going without them. At the end of the month, the rule-keeping chain switched its mining to BLAKE2b so the captured SHA-256 hash couldn't take it over. That chain is XBT. The full story is in How Bitcoin kept its rules and moved to BLAKE2b.

Patients on life support don't look healthy, and XBT doesn't either. About 102 XBT buy one BTC. It has had three bear markets in six weeks. That's what a rescue looks like from the outside. The people in the ER right now, the node runners, the miners, the builders shipping wallets and pools every week, are doing the work while the outcome is anything but certain. If the patient makes it, they're the ones who saved it.

The strangest part: you already own it

If you held bitcoin before Aug 8, 2026, you hold XBT. Same coins, same addresses, same keys. The proof of work that secured your coins for 17 years secures them on both chains, because the history is identical up to block 961,631. Every UTXO that existed before the split exists on XBT. The XBT you hold cost you exactly what your BTC cost you.

Since the split, the two histories have gone different ways. XBT's blocks follow BIP-110's rules: less data that isn't money, a cleaner chain going forward. Not sure what you hold? Check an address.

Two places at once

The body is still on the old chain: the brand, the network effect, the exchange listings, the ticker everyone knows. That doesn't disappear overnight, and we won't pretend it does.

But the thing that made Bitcoin worth caring about was never the brand. It was the idea: money that no state, no company and no small group of operators can change on users without their consent. That idea now lives on the chain whose users enforced their rules when it mattered. The body stayed. The soul moved.

Bitcoin was always a quiet way to separate money from the state. It still is. It just lives somewhere new.

Opinion. Not financial advice. XBT trades on thin markets and can lose most of its value quickly. Price figures as of the evening of Oct 10, 2026 (US Eastern).