Markers Sunday: The Retarget Settled at +1.31% and Graded D2 a Fail and F1 a Pass, Funding Printed Its First Negative Settlement in 113 Rows, 6,463 Coins of Leverage Have Now Left in Two Days, and the ETFs’ $174.6 Million Took September to +$770 Million

The Bitcoin difficulty retarget at block 965,664 was mined at 20:32:47 UTC on Saturday 5 September and adjusted difficulty by +1.3065%, per mempool.space’s difficulty-adjustment series, to 127,450,789,715,843 — 127.45 trillion. That settled two markers set in August. D2, which asked for an adjustment in the range −1.50% to 0.00%, failed; F1, which asked for any adjustment at or above 0.00%, passed. Neither result was in doubt by Saturday morning, when the difficulty update put the projection at +1.200% with 90 blocks to go and worked out that the remaining blocks would have needed to average about twelve and a half minutes to bring the figure to zero. The 89 intervals that remained averaged 9.65. This piece prints the realised period arithmetic, grades the two markers, and then does what a Sunday markers piece does: walks the fifteen other open claims against the weekend’s numbers, of which the two that changed are the perpetual funding rate and the ETF table. All figures are as of 06:10 UTC on Sunday 6 September unless stated.

The retarget arithmetic: 2,015 intervals, 592.6 seconds each, and a fast finish

The period ran from block 963,648, mined at 00:48:47 UTC on 23 August, to block 965,663, mined at 20:28:52 UTC on 5 September — 1,194,005 seconds across 2,015 block intervals, or 592.56 seconds (9.876 minutes) per block against the 600-second target. The ratio of the target fortnight (1,209,600 seconds) to the actual gives +1.3061%; mempool.space prints +1.3065%, the difference being rounding in the difficulty target rather than in the timestamps, and we quote mempool’s figure as the series of record. When Saturday morning’s update was written, 1,926 blocks had used 1,142,484 seconds. The remaining 89 intervals took 51,521 seconds, or 578.9 seconds (9.65 minutes) each — faster than the period’s own average, which is why the realised adjustment exceeded the projection by 0.11 percentage points and why the retarget arrived 27 minutes before mempool’s ~21:00 UTC estimate. Difficulty now stands 0.023% below the 8 August level of 127.48 trillion, 4.795% below the 27 June level of 133.87 trillion, which is the highest since the 14 June cut, and 12.98% below the 8 January level of 146.47 trillion, the 2026 high. The seven retargets since mid-June now read: −10.09%, +7.15%, −5.00%, −0.74%, +0.99%, −1.31%, +1.31%. The last two cancel to the second decimal.

The daily hashrate series, read with the end-of-day stamping convention established on Saturday, has Friday 4 September at 913.44 EH/s and Saturday 5 September at 915.03 EH/s; the 30-row mean covering 7 August to 5 September is 910.27 EH/s, and mempool’s recent-blocks estimate (`currentHashrate`, which is not an average) reads 924.28. The next retarget is due at block 967,680, which mempool estimates for around 17:00 UTC on Saturday 19 September; 58 blocks of the new period had been mined at our pull against 57.7 expected, and as standing practice we will not quote the projection until roughly a quarter of the period is in, which is Wednesday. Marker P1 — that the 19 September adjustment is positive — is open and ungraded. Over the trailing week mempool counts 1,026 blocks, 12 fewer than the 1,038 a week earlier, with Foundry USA at 275 (26.8%), AntPool 175 (17.1%), F2Pool 156 (15.2%), SpiderPool 89 (8.7%), ViaBTC 74 (7.2%) and SECPOOL 59 (5.8%). Fees are at 2/1/1/1 sat/vB across the four mempool tiers.

Leverage: the second day of the exit, and a funding print below zero

Thursday’s rally arrived with 5,065 coins of new perpetual open interest on Binance; Saturday’s markers piece recorded 4,805 of them leaving on Friday. The 00:00 UTC Sunday snapshot has open interest at 106,255.013 BTC, down a further 1,657.52 coins (−1.536%) from Saturday’s 107,912.535 — the fourth-largest one-day decline of the 29 daily changes in the 30-snapshot window we hold from 8 August to 6 September, behind Saturday’s −4,805, the −4,547 into 18 August and the −3,153 into 29 August. Over the two days since Thursday’s 00:00 peak of 112,717.545, open interest has fallen 6,462.53 coins, or 5.733%; measured against Wednesday’s 107,652.063, before the rally, it is now 1,397.05 coins lower. The leverage that bought Thursday has left, and it took some of the older leverage with it. In dollar terms open interest fell from $8,591.58 million to $8,479.15 million (−1.309%); the coin ratio 0.98464 times the implied mark ratio 1.00231 gives 0.98691, which matches the dollar ratio, and the implied 00:00 mark price of about $79,800 is consistent with Binance’s spot print. The live figure at 06:10 UTC was 106,278.070. Marker G1, which needs any September 00:00 snapshot below 100,000 coins, is 6.26% away, from 7.91% on Saturday.

Funding is the other change. The 08:00 UTC Saturday settlement on the Binance BTCUSDT perpetual printed −0.000150% per eight hours, or −0.164% annualised — the first negative settlement in the 113-row window running from 30 July at 16:00 UTC to 6 September at 00:00 UTC. The lowest positive settlement in that window was 0.000629% at 16:00 on 14 August, and the last negative print before Saturday’s was −0.000343% at 00:00 on 23 July, outside the window. Saturday’s did not last: the 16:00 settlement was 0.001923% and Sunday’s 00:00 print 0.003589%, which is 3.930% annualised. Twenty-six of the 113 settlements were at Binance’s 0.0100% default rate and the window mean is 7.195% annualised, so one print fifteen-thousandths of a basis point below zero is a footnote on the level and a headline only on the sign: shorts paid longs for eight hours on Saturday morning for the first time since 23 July, which is what a perpetual does when the last of the leveraged longs have been squeezed out and nobody has replaced them. The global long/short account ratio moved from 1.0165 to 1.0475 and the top-trader position ratio eased from 2.1587 — the highest of the eleven rows we hold from 27 August — to 2.1028, the fourth-highest, behind 27 August’s 2.1462 and 29 August’s 2.1439.

Basis: the September contract went from 104 basis points below the bill to 87 above it

The quarterly basis moved more than anything else on the derivatives board, and in the other direction from funding. With the Binance COIN-M index at $79,944.99 at 06:10 UTC, the September contract at $80,144.6 carries a 0.2497% premium with 19.08 days to its 25 September expiry, which annualises to 4.777%; on Saturday morning the same calculation gave 2.875%. The December contract at $81,028.1 is 1.3548% over the index with 110.08 days to run, or 4.492% annualised, from 4.335%. So the near contract is once again annualising above the far one, and the September basis is 87 basis points above the 3-month Treasury bill’s 3.91% where on Saturday it was 104 below. Meanwhile the perpetual’s 3.930% annualised funding is 85 basis points below the September basis. Readers of Field Guide #37 will recognise the configuration: cash-and-carry into the quarterly is paying again and the perpetual is not, which is a market in which the leverage has moved from the retail instrument to the institutional one rather than left the building. Marker G2, which needs the September basis above 8.00% on 25 September, is 322 basis points short. Marker I3 — a September basis below 4.00% — was settled as a pass on Friday at 2.849%; today’s 4.777% would not have passed it, and we note that without reopening it. A settled marker grades the day it named, which is the whole point of naming the day.

ETFs: Friday’s row filled at $174.6 million, and September is +$770 million

Farside’s 4 September row, blank at Saturday’s pull, now reads — every fund column printed from the table with its header — IBIT 117.4, FBTC 57.2, and zeros in BITB, ARKB, BTCO, EZBC, BRRR, HODL, BTCW, MSBT, GBTC and BTC, for a total of 174.6. Two funds took in money on the day the jobs report pushed hike odds back above 50%; ten did nothing. The week of 31 August to 4 September sums to 216.7 − 236.5 + 101.1 + 730.8 + 174.6 = $986.7 million, and September’s four sessions to +$770.0 million, which is where marker H2 (a positive September) stands with seventeen of the month’s twenty-one sessions to go. IBIT was 67.24% of Friday’s total and is 77.32% of the fifteen visible sessions on the table — $2,960.6 million of $3,829.0 million since 17 August. Monday is Labor Day; the next row is Tuesday’s.

Price and the rest of the board

Bitstamp’s Saturday candle ran from an open of $79,676.60 to a high of $80,187.04, a low of $79,464.65 and a close of $79,830.42, up 0.193%, on 552.23 BTC of volume — the 30th-lowest volume of 248 sessions in 2026. The $722.39 high-to-low range was the tenth-narrowest of the year; the narrowest remains 15 August’s $249.42. The week from the 28 August close of $77,835.18 is +2.563%, the month from 31 August’s $78,571.17 is +1.603%, and the year from the 2025 close of $87,496.00 is −8.761%. At 06:10 UTC Binance spot was $79,937.66, 0.134% above the close. Strategy’s $80,318 tranche of 4,603 coins was $2.24 million underwater at the close and $1.75 million at the snapshot; marker L1 (a 16 September close at or above $81,265.00) is $1,434.58 below its bar, and M1 — a Strategy 8-K by Tuesday disclosing at least one coin bought between 31 August and 6 September — grades on Tuesday, Monday being a US holiday. The Fear & Greed index held at 73, an eighteenth consecutive Greed reading since 20 August. There is no Treasury file on a Saturday, so H3 (30-year at or above 5.25% on 17 September) is still failing by one basis point at 5.24%, I1 (real 10-year at or above 2.50% by 16 September) is still seven basis points away at 2.43%, and I2 (a BOJ hike on 18 September), K1 (60 votes for CLARITY cloture by 18 September — today’s update has the House calendar that changed on Thursday), N1 (hike odds at or above 60% on the evening of 11 September) and O1 (a 5-basis-point 2-year move on the CPI-day close) wait for their dates.

The marker table

What D2 and F1 were for

D2 and F1 were set on the same subject with different bars so that the desk’s reading of the hashrate series could be graded twice: once on direction, once on magnitude. On direction it was right — the network did not get easier. On magnitude it was wrong, and the record of how it was wrong runs from the 30 August piece, which first flagged D2 as failing, through the five mornings from 1 September on which the projection printed +1.42%, +0.80%, +0.23%, +1.47% and +1.20% before settling at +1.31%. The lesson is not that projections are noisy, which everyone knows, but that a two-week average is decided disproportionately by its last few days when those days are fast or slow — Thursday’s 987 EH/s daily reading and Saturday’s 9.65-minute finish moved the figure more than anything in the first week. The next test of the same reading is P1. We set it before the first block of the period and we will not adjust it.

Method: prices, funding, open interest, basis and on-chain figures in this article are pulled directly by Bitcoin Mastery at the timestamp stated — Bitstamp BTC/USD daily candles for closes, Binance BTCUSDT spot and USDT-margined perpetual for intraday, open interest, funding and account ratios, Binance COIN-M quarterly contracts for basis, mempool.space for difficulty, hashrate, pool shares and fees, alternative.me for the Fear & Greed series, Farside Investors’ table for ETF flows (every named fund column is read from a print of that column with its header) and US Treasury CMT par yields, nominal and real, for rates. Where a third-party figure is cited we name the source and its date; where two sources disagree we print both. Every streak or extreme figure is published with the first date of its series in the same sentence.

Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Cryptocurrencies are volatile and you can lose money. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy or sell any security, digital asset or exchange-traded fund, including MSTR. Do your own research and consult a licensed financial advisor before making investment decisions.