Week of 26 January 2026: Bitcoin -11.19% and Ether -19.41%, low in Sunday's last hour
When a week ends near its own low and both assets fall sharply, what does the data reveal about the path of the decline, and what does it leave unexplained?
BTC fell from 86,670.36 to 76,968.21 (-11.19%) and ETH from 2,816.90 to 2,270.15 (-19.41%). Both weekly lows arrived at 23:00 UTC on Sunday 1 February, the last hour of the week. Weekly returns ranked at the 7th percentile for BTC and the 5th for ETH across 415 weeks of history.
What the data shows. The week rose first and fell after: BTC's high of 90,600.00 came on Wednesday 28 January, and the low of 75,700.00 came on Sunday 1 February, a range of 19.68% from low to high. Both closes sit in the lower third of their weekly ranges (BTC 8.5%, ETH 5.8%), so neither asset recovered into the close. The heaviest losses clustered late: Saturday 31 January was the worst day for both (BTC -6.55%, ETH -9.43%), and ETH's largest hourly move, -3.44%, came at 14:00 UTC that day. Volume ran above the prior twelve-week average (BTC 1.19 times, ETH 1.32 times). The two assets moved closely together (hourly correlation 0.86), but ETH fell further, so the ETH/BTC ratio dropped 9.25%.
What it does not show. Price data cannot identify what caused the selling or who was doing it. Funding near zero (BTC averaging 0.0044% per eight hours, ETH 0.0007%) tells us that positions in perpetual contracts were neither paying heavily one way nor the other, but says nothing about position size. The data has no open-interest or order-book figures, so the depth of any forced selling cannot be measured here.
What a careful desk would check. Realised volatility, the size of the swings that actually happened scaled to a yearly figure, reached 49.8% for BTC and 78.1% for ETH. A decline that ends in the week's final hour, with the close at 8.5% and 5.8% of the range, offers no confirmation that the low held. A desk would compare its stop distances against the -2.39% (BTC) and -3.44% (ETH) hourly extremes and ask whether exits could have been filled in those hours.
Ether against Bitcoin. ETH lost 8.22 percentage points more than BTC over the week, and the ratio's 9.25% decline means this was not a uniform market move. ETH also sat 54.0% below its 52-week high against BTC's 38.92%, so the relative weakness compounded an already larger gap.
What would change this reading
- If a later week trades below this week's lows of 75,700.00 (BTC) and 2,222.00 (ETH), the Sunday close reads as the start of a further leg rather than a floor.
- If price recovers towards the Wednesday highs of 90,600.00 and 3,045.78 while volume returns to its twelve-week average, the week reads as a shock that was absorbed.
- If the ETH/BTC ratio stops falling after a 9.25% weekly decline, the relative weakness has paused, which changes which hedge matters.
- If funding turns clearly negative while price stays weak, shorts begin paying and the crowded side shifts.
Terms
- realised volatility
- how much the price actually swung over a period, expressed as a yearly percentage
- ETH/BTC ratio
- the price of one Ether divided by the price of one Bitcoin; it rises when Ether outperforms Bitcoin
- percentile
- the share of past weeks with a lower value; a low percentile means most past weeks were higher