Markers Thursday: The ETFs Took Back $101 Million of Tuesday’s Outflow, GBTC Posted Its Largest Redemption in 13 Sessions, and the Difficulty Projection Has Fallen 1.18 Points in 48 Hours

Nothing settled on Thursday. The retarget that grades D2 and F1 has moved to early Sunday, Friday’s payrolls report is the week’s only scheduled shock, and the ten open markers are all still open. This is the daily grade — every figure pulled by this desk at 06:10 UTC on 3 September 2026, every carried-forward number recomputed from its raw inputs rather than copied from yesterday’s prose, per the rule we installed after Tuesday’s +151bp error.

Own computation, 3 September 2026, 06:10 UTC. J1, set today in the payrolls piece, grades on Friday’s 2-year close and is not on this table until it has a reading.

H2: the second session gave back $101.1 million of the first, and IBIT was not the story

Farside’s completed column for 2 September reads +$101.1 million: IBIT +$115.4m, Grayscale’s mini BTC +$30.4m, MSBT +$7.3m, BITB +$4.2m, and GBTC −$56.2m, with seven funds at zero including FBTC, which had lost $43.7m on Tuesday. September stands at −$135.4 million after two sessions (−236.5 + 101.1), and IBIT at −$85.8 million (−201.2 + 115.4).

Two things in that column are worth more than the total. First, GBTC’s −$56.2 million is the largest GBTC redemption in the 13 sessions on Farside’s current table, 17 August to 2 September: the trust printed +$21.2m on 19 August, −$50.4m on 26 August and −$27.2m on 27 August, and was flat for the four sessions in between. We cannot say “largest since” beyond that because the all-data table was unreachable this morning (HTTP 403), so the claim stops at 13 rows. An earlier draft of this paragraph called Wednesday’s print the only GBTC redemption on the table; it was the third, and the delegated arithmetic pass caught it before publication. Second, the mini fund gained $30.4 million on the same day the legacy trust lost $56.2 million. Grayscale’s BTC charges 0.15% against GBTC’s 1.50%, and a same-day pair of that shape is what a fee-driven switch looks like; net, Grayscale lost $25.8 million. Either way, the $30.4 million should not be read as fresh demand.

Across the 13 sessions on the table the funds have taken in $2,923.6 million, of which IBIT supplied $2,389.2 million, or 81.72%. On Wednesday IBIT was 73.36% of the gross inflow (115.4 of 157.3). H2 needs $135.4 million of net buying over the 20 sessions from 3 to 30 September, $6.8 million a session — a bar the August run rate cleared by a wide margin and the first two September sessions did not. We repeat yesterday’s finding as the reason not to read the sign: across 32 complete months, the first session’s sign matched the month’s sign 16 times. Two sessions is not more informative than one.

H1: 3.383% away after a second red close

Bitstamp closed 2 September at $77,301.83, down 0.124% (from $77,397.43), on a range of $76,228.56 to $77,747.28 — the second red close of the month and the narrowest daily range since 29 August. At the 06:10 UTC snapshot of $77,690.09, H1’s bar of $80,318 — Strategy’s own disclosed average for its 24–30 August tranche — requires +3.383%, from +1.695% when the marker was set on Tuesday and +3.427% yesterday. On a close-to-close basis it needs +3.902%. The tranche itself is worth $357.61 million at the snapshot against $369.70 million paid, −$12.10 million or −3.272%; the full 845,050-coin position is worth $65.652 billion against $63.727 billion of cost, +$1.925 billion or +3.021%, down from +$3.044 billion when the tranche was disclosed. MSTR closed Wednesday at $123.19, down 1.353% on the day and 10.342% below its 27 August close of $137.40.

D2 and F1: the projection has fallen 1.18 points in two mornings and now settles Sunday

mempool.space’s projection for the retarget at block 965,664 read +0.234% at the snapshot, with 80.31% of the period complete and 397 blocks remaining, on an average block interval of 598.97 seconds. Three mornings ago it was +1.415%; yesterday +0.796%. That is a 1.18-point fall in 48 hours on a projection that had risen for three straight days before that, and the estimated retarget time has slipped from Saturday 22:23 UTC to Sunday 6 September, 00:14 UTC. The 3-day hashrate average is 907.27 EH/s, down 1.88% from yesterday’s 924.62 — the first decline after the series high — and fees are at the 1 sat/vB floor for the fourteenth consecutive day since 21 August.

The two markers sit on opposite sides of a number that is 0.23 points from zero. D2 (retarget between −1.50% and 0.00%) is failing by 0.23pp; F1 (retarget at or above zero) is passing by the same 0.23pp. With 397 of 2,016 blocks still to run, the final fifth of the period can still move the projection by several tenths of a point in either direction, so both outcomes remain live into Saturday. D2 was set on 27 August at a projection of −0.63% and F1 on 30 August, when the projection still argued against it; they sit on either side of the same threshold, and the retarget is going to grade one of them wrong. That was the point.

G1 and G2: open interest fell in both units, and the identity closes

Binance BTCUSDT perpetual open interest at the 00:00 UTC snapshot was 107,652.063 BTC, down 0.595% from 108,296.678, and $8,321.78 million, down 0.724% from $8,382.48 million. The implied mark fell 0.130% (from $77,402.93 to $77,302.61), and the identity closes: 0.99405 × 0.99870 = 0.99276, which is $8,321.78m / $8,382.48m to five decimal places. Coins left and price fell, in that order of magnitude; nobody was liquidated in size and nobody added. Live open interest at 06:10 UTC was 107,420.58 BTC. G1’s bar of 100,000 BTC is 7.65% away, from 8.30% yesterday.

Basis, against a COIN-M index of $77,685.86: the September contract at $77,888.20 is a 0.2605% premium over 22.08 days, or 4.306% annualised (from 4.293% yesterday, +1bp); the December contract at $78,768.90 is a 1.3941% premium over 113.08 days, or 4.500% annualised (from 4.537%). The curve is inverted by 19bp, from 24bp yesterday. September’s excess over the 3-month bill (3.92% on 2 September) is +39bp; December’s over the 4-month bill (4.02%) is +48bp. G2 (September basis above 8.00%) is 369bp short and has not been within 250bp of its bar since it was set; I3 (below 4.00% at any 06:00 UTC snapshot) is 31bp away. Both remain open because the series moved 117bp in a single day on Tuesday.

Funding over the last 90 settlements — 4 August 08:00 UTC to 3 September 00:00 UTC, 90 rows — averages 0.006820% per eight hours, or 7.468% annualised (from 7.380%), with 24 of 90 at the 0.01% cap and none negative. The most recent settlement was 0.007287%, 7.979% annualised, so the perpetual is paying 367bp more than the September future returns. The global long/short account ratio was 1.2148 at the daily snapshot (from 1.2862) and the top-trader ratio 1.2957 (from 1.3883): still net long into a flat tape, four observations since we began printing it on Sunday, still not a series.

H3 and I1: the long end held, the real yield crept one basis point closer

The Treasury’s 2 September file: 2-year 4.39% (unchanged), 5-year 4.54% (−1bp), 10-year 4.79% (unchanged), 20-year 5.27% (unchanged), 30-year 5.27% (unchanged) — H3 passing with 2bp of cushion against its 5.25% bar, which grades on the 17 September close, the day after the FOMC. The real file: 5-year 2.19% (+1bp), 10-year 2.45% (+1bp), 5bp from I1’s 2.50% bar and 2bp from the 2026 high of 2.47% set on 31 July; 30-year 2.98% (unchanged). The 10-year breakeven therefore fell one basis point to 2.34%. On the ADP miss, in other words, the rates market moved one basis point of real yield and nothing else, which is the finding the payrolls piece is built on.

I2 has no new information: the Bank of Japan meets 17–18 September, and the 3.00% JGB print from Tuesday has not been followed by anything from the BOJ itself. The Nikkei was down 0.200% at the snapshot after Wednesday’s 2.85% fall; the Kospi was up 0.290% after a 3.99% fall. Both are third-party quotes.

Sentiment: fifteenth Greed reading, and the run is now longer than the Fear run it replaced

Fear & Greed printed 65 on 3 September (from 63), the fifteenth consecutive Greed reading in a run that began on 20 August 2026 at 62; the last Fear reading was 46 on 19 August. The five readings before that — 15 to 19 August — were 34, 34, 31, 41 and 46, so the current run is now three times the length of the visible Fear stretch that preceded it. We still decline to rank the run against the full series, which begins on 1 February 2018 and which we did not re-pull today.

What grades next

Friday 08:30 ET, August payrolls, grades J1 (2-year moves ≥ 5bp) on the Treasury’s Friday file, published that evening. Sunday ~00:14 UTC, the retarget, grades D2 and F1 — one passes, one fails, and the projection has been moving fast enough that we will not guess which. H2 gets its third session tonight. I1 is 5bp away on a series that has moved 11bp in four sessions; I3 is 31bp away on a series that moved 117bp in one. Everything else runs to its date. Gold remains barred as a marker input, twelfth day: the futures series is a third-party quote and PAXG is a proxy.

For the mechanics behind any of these readings: Field Guide #37 covers the open-interest identity, funding and basis; Field Guide #39 covers the real/breakeven split; Field Guide #38 covers the tranche-versus-position arithmetic; and today’s Field Guide #40 covers the jobs-week scoring that J1 is built on. All forty are indexed in the Reading Room.

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 and monthly returns, Binance BTCUSDT spot and perpetual for intraday and derivatives, Binance COIN-M quarterly contracts for basis, mempool.space for difficulty, hashrate and fees, alternative.me for the Fear & Greed series, Farside Investors’ flow table for ETF flows, and the US Treasury’s daily nominal and real par-yield files for rates. Equity, commodity and dollar closes are from Yahoo Finance’s chart feed and are third-party quotes. 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, every windowed pull carries its row count, and every figure carried forward from a previous article is recomputed from raw inputs rather than copied.

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. Do your own research and consult a licensed financial advisor before making investment decisions.