Bitcoin (BTC) Explained: What It Is and How It Trades

What is Bitcoin? Bitcoin (BTC) is a peer-to-peer digital currency with a fixed cap of 21 million coins, secured by proof of work. As a market it is the benchmark: every other large coin is measured against its range and its structure. In our 90-day data BTC moves 2.7% a day on average, is about 2.3 times busier at its peak hour than at its quietest, and gives up more than half of its weekday range on weekends.

This page is built on our own numbers, computed from Binance spot candles for the 90 days from 14 July to 11 October 2026 (UTC), plus supply data from CoinGecko fetched on 12 October 2026. Nothing here is a forecast.

What is Bitcoin

Bitcoin's first specification and proof of concept were published in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto, and CoinGecko lists the genesis date as 3 January 2009. Three rules define the asset:

• A hard cap. The network has "a total of 21 million bitcoins in existence".
• A steady clock. New blocks are added about every 10 minutes on average, each one carrying a proof of work.
• A shrinking issuance. The number of new bitcoins created each year is automatically halved over time.

The first block on the chain is block 0, the genesis block. Traders treat BTC as the reference point for the rest of the market. You will see it in the numbers below: the other coins we track move more than BTC, not less. Two older proof-of-work coins show the pattern: Litecoin correlated 0.61 with BTC's daily returns over 90 days, and Bitcoin Cash, which split from Bitcoin in August 2017 with the same 21 million cap, averaged a daily range 2.1 times Bitcoin's.

How BTC trades: the fingerprint

The cover of this article is BTC's fingerprint: 24 bars, one per UTC hour, each showing the average range (high minus low, as a percentage of the open) of the 1h candles in that hour. Over 90 days BTC averages a daily range of 2.7%, with a median of 2.3%. One way to see it: 39 of the 90 days stayed under 2%, and only 3 days printed 8% or more.

The clock has one clear hump. The 1h range starts rising at 12:00 UTC (0.59%), peaks at 14:00 UTC (0.82%, which is 17:00 in Moscow and 10:00 in New York) and fades through 16:00 UTC (0.53%). The quietest hour is 20:00 UTC at 0.35%, so the peak hour is about 2.3 times as active. Grouped into sessions, the average hourly range is 0.42% in Asia (00:00 to 08:00 UTC), 0.48% in London (08:00 to 13:00) and 0.57% in New York (13:00 to 21:00). New York is about 36% busier than Asia. We report the clock, not its cause. For the session definitions we use elsewhere, see trading sessions and when is the best time to trade crypto.

The weekday-by-hour view shows how much of this is a weekday effect.

At 14:00 UTC the average hourly range is 1.02% on weekdays, 0.42% on Sunday and 0.25% on Saturday. The single hottest cell is Friday 13:00 UTC at 1.27%, and it is inflated by one day: 21 August was a Friday with an 8.9% range. The one weekend cell that lights up is Sunday 22:00 UTC (01:00 Monday in Moscow) at 0.68%.

Averaged over all 26 weekend days and 64 weekdays, the daily range is 1.44% at the weekend and 3.24% on weekdays: weekends carry 45% of the weekday range. Read the Wednesday and Friday bars with care. 19 August (9.0%, a Wednesday) and 21 August (8.9%, a Friday) are the two widest days in the sample and pull those bars up. We make no claim about their cause.

Supply and unlocks

According to CoinGecko on 12 October 2026, 20,097,262 BTC are in circulation out of a maximum of 21,000,000. That is 95.7% of the cap, and 902,738 coins are still to be issued.

Bitcoin has no unlock calendar to follow. New supply arrives only as block rewards, and the rate of new issuance halves over time (bitcoin.org). The practical consequence for a trader is that supply is a slow background fact, not a catalyst on the chart.

Where it trades

BTC trades on every large venue. We pulled the rolling 24-hour spot volume from the public ticker APIs of five of them on 12 October 2026 at 20:18 UTC.

Binance leads with about $1.02 billion (36% of the five-venue total), then Bybit at $661 million (23%), OKX at $450 million (16%), KuCoin at $383 million (13%) and Coinbase at $334 million (12%). The total is about $2.84 billion. Four venues are USDT pairs and Coinbase is the USD pair, so treat the shares as a snapshot of five venues, not of the whole market. Our candles come from Binance, so every number in this article is Binance's BTCUSDT.

BTC vs the rest of the market

BTC is the yardstick for the other coins in the Coin Library. Over the same 90 days:

Every coin in the table moves with BTC (correlations of 0.83 to 0.88) and moves further. If you size positions off BTC's range, the same stop distance is too tight for the others. See the companion guides for Ethereum, Solana and XRP, or browse the Coin Library.

Reading BTC's structure

Statistics tell you how much BTC moves. Structure tells you where it is. The chart below is the 4h BTCUSDT chart for 3 to 12 October 2026, annotated by the BiasNex engine as of 12 October.

The engine marked a break of structure (BOS) to the downside, a change of character (CHoCH) to the downside, and then a CHoCH back up. At the snapshot the previous-day high (PDH) was 84,199, the previous-day low (PDL) 82,805 and a sell-side liquidity level (SSL) sat at 81,400. For the definitions, read market structure and change of character. This is a dated snapshot. For the structure right now, open today's live BTC structure.

Risks

• Ninety days is one regime. The clock and the weekday pattern are descriptive. They can change when market conditions change.
• A few days drive the averages. The 19 and 21 August spikes lift the Wednesday and Friday numbers. The median daily range (2.3%) is the safer guide to a normal day.
• Thin weekends are not safe weekends. A smaller average range does not cap the size of a single move. Use a stop you can afford, and calculate it with the position size calculator.
• One venue. Prices and volumes differ slightly between exchanges.

FAQ

What is Bitcoin? Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer digital currency with a cap of 21 million coins, a new block about every 10 minutes and issuance that is automatically halved over time, secured by proof of work (bitcoin.org).

What time of day is BTC most active? In the 90 days to 11 October 2026 the busiest UTC hour was 14:00, with an average 1h range of 0.82%. The quietest was 20:00 UTC at 0.35%.

Is BTC quieter on weekends? Yes. Its average daily range was 1.44% on weekend days against 3.24% on weekdays in our sample. Saturday was the quietest day, at 1.10%.