Week in review · Oct 18, 2026

XBT week in review: down 22%, a $505 low, and the lock cliff comes into view

By xbt.live · 2 minute read

XBT fell 22% on the week, hit $505 on Thursday and bounced. Underneath, difficulty rose 17%, we found that the coinbase lock ends with a cliff, and XBT got its first peer-to-peer market. Here's the week in two minutes.

Daily XBT candles from Oct 11 to Oct 17: a high of 958 dollars on Oct 11, a low of 505 dollars on Oct 16, closing the week near 651 dollars

📈 Price

Week: $835 to $651 (daily closes), down about 22%.
Range: a $958 high on Oct 11 to a $505 low on Oct 16.
The ride: two sharp drops on Oct 11 and 12, a rebound to $820 on Oct 13, a 20% slide on Oct 15, then a bounce from $505 back to about $650. Thursday's drop, hour by hour
The bigger picture: XBT's fourth bear market since trading opened, and so far every bottom has been higher than the last. The higher-lows case, and the case against
Against BTC: about 128 XBT buy 1 BTC, up from 101 a week ago.

⛏️ Mining

Difficulty +16.9% at block 977,760 on Saturday, the third rise in a row. Hash price fell to about $6.71 per TH per day at today's price. The numbers
Hash rate held around 43 PH/s.
Pools, last 7 days: AlphaPool 25%, Lazarus 24%, CONVOY 13%. Over the last 24 hours CONVOY climbed to #2. Live pool share
Have miners been dumping? We checked 591 pre-lock mining rewards: about 72% have moved, mostly Sept 6 to 21, and about 10,200 XBT hasn't. The analysis

🔒 The coinbase lock

It ends with a cliff. We read the Knots code: at block 979,920, around Nov 1, the lock switches off for about 20,250 XBT at once. Why
Knots PR #429 would lock new rewards until Sept 1, 2027, plus a one-year relay hold on every reward with no end date. It's open, not released, and has to be running before block 979,920. Both locks explained
New: the Lock Pressure chart tracks locked rewards now and how much actually moves after the release. See it

🛠️ Builders

Roblosats launched: RoboSats-style peer-to-peer XBT trading over Lightning, with no account and no ID. How it works
New splitting wallets keep appearing from both sides of the fork. Before you trust one with a pre-fork seed: seven checks.

👀 Next week

About 2,100 blocks to the unlock. Expect block 979,920 around Oct 31 to Nov 1. Countdown
Next difficulty adjustment at block 979,776, about a day before the unlock, early estimate +5%.
PR #429: any merge or release would change the unlock.
Thursday: XBT Block #3 in your inbox.

Live XBT stats All news

Not financial advice. Prices are NeoxEX XBT/USDC daily closes (UTC); chain data from public XBT explorers via xbt.live, as of Oct 17, 2026.

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).