Crypto Market Recap Sep 26: Bitcoin Steady at $84,300 USD, Altcoins Cool
Bitcoin (BTC) traded at $84,336.94 USD, or $119,288.36 CAD, in a snapshot taken at 7:05pm ET Saturday. It was up 0.36% on the day on the US dollar line. Crypto trades continuously, so that is a snapshot rather than a closing price. Where this piece does quote closes, they come from three different clocks: Yahoo Finance daily bars cut at midnight UTC, Yahoo hourly bars at 4:00pm and 9:00am ET, and the TSX’s own 4:00pm close. Each one is named where it is used.
Nothing much happened, and that is the most useful thing about today. What did happen is that the Toronto Stock Exchange was shut, so any Canadian who holds Bitcoin through a TSX-listed fund had no market at all.
A Canadian holding the ETF had no market today, and that is worth measuring
Several issuers list Bitcoin funds on the TSX. The one measured throughout this piece is Purpose’s, which runs in several share classes, hedged and non-hedged, as set out on the Purpose Bitcoin ETF fund page. The non-currency-hedged class, BTCC.B, last printed on Friday September 25 at $16.73 on Yahoo Finance data. Across 252 daily bars in the past year, not one falls on a Saturday or a Sunday. The TSX’s own trading hours put the regular session at 9:30am to 4:00pm, and those 252 bars are where the weekends went.
Bitcoin, meanwhile, has not stopped. In Canadian dollars it is up 0.37% since Friday’s 4:00pm ET bell. On that move alone, Friday’s $16.73 marks to something close to $16.79, give or take the few cents of tracking discussed below, and Sunday has not happened yet.
Today that gap is small. It is not always.
Take the 49 breaks between October 3, 2025 and September 18, 2026 that began with a regular Friday session, and measure Bitcoin in Canadian dollars from Friday’s 4:00pm ET bell to the last hourly bar before the next opening bell, 9:00am ET. The move averaged 2.17% in absolute terms, with a median of 1.98% and a largest move of 6.49%. Thirty-three of the 49 moved at least 1%, 23 moved at least 2% and 13 moved at least 3%. Signed, 28 came back positive and 21 negative, for an average of +0.36%, which at this sample size is not far from a coin toss and should be read as one.
The ten largest of the 49 TSX weekend breaks in the year to September 18, 2026. Source: Bitcoin in Canadian dollars from Yahoo Finance hourly closes, BTCC.B from Yahoo Finance daily bars, and our arithmetic on them.
The reopen mostly catches up, and the misses are small but real
Measured on its own prints, from Friday’s close to the next session’s open, BTCC.B gapped by an average of 2.19% in absolute terms across the same 49 breaks, with a median of 1.89% and a largest gap of 6.78%. Those aggregates sit close to Bitcoin’s own 2.17%, but matching averages say nothing about any individual break. The break-by-break figure does.
Break by break, the size of BTCC.B’s gap has differed from Bitcoin’s Canadian-dollar move by an average of 0.29 percentage points, a median of 0.19 and a maximum of 1.14. That widest one was the July 3 break, where Bitcoin slipped 0.48% and BTCC.B opened down 1.62%. On five of the 49 the two moved in opposite directions outright, though in every one of those Bitcoin’s own move was under 0.4%, small enough that a few minutes of timing decides the sign. The most recent large divergence was last weekend: Bitcoin rose 5.19% in Canadian dollars while the TSX was closed and BTCC.B opened 4.18% higher, a shortfall of about a point.
Part of that spread is the measurement itself. Bitcoin’s window stops at the 9:00am ET bar and the fund’s gap runs to the 9:30 open, so half an hour of trading sits inside the difference. The rest is the ordinary business of an exchange-traded fund finding its price.
It is worth being precise about who this reaches. A holder who does nothing is not out of pocket: they mark to market at the next open and the weekend was an event they slept through. The gap lands on whoever transacts into the reopen, and it cuts both ways: 21 of the 49 windows were negative, which is a buyer at the open collecting the gap rather than paying it.
The hedged class does not solve this. Hedging strips out the Canadian dollar’s move against the US dollar; it does nothing about Bitcoin’s, which is nearly all of what a weekend gap is made of.
Five of the 49 breaks ran an extra day because a statutory Monday closed the exchange too, pushing the reopen to Tuesday, and those averaged 2.30% against 2.15% for the ordinary weekends. Five observations is not a pattern, but the next such break is Thanksgiving, Monday October 12.
A reader tempted to trade around one of these by swapping between coins, which is possible at any hour, should know first that every crypto swap is a disposition the CRA counts, regardless of which token comes out the other side. The same closure applies to Canadian crypto stocks listed here, which were shut today for the same reason the fund was. The magnitudes above do not carry over to them: an operating company reopens on its own earnings and beta, not on Bitcoin’s weekend move.
Bitcoin and Ethereum held while everything else came off
Prices below are the Canadian-dollar line, with 24-hour and 7-day changes measured on that same basis.
| Asset | Price (CAD) | 24h | 7 days |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin (BTC) | $119,288 | +0.35% | +4.90% |
| Ethereum (ETH) | $3,804 | -0.04% | +3.26% |
| XRP | $2.15 | -2.93% | +9.08% |
| Solana (SOL) | $171 | -0.67% | +10.31% |
| Dogecoin (DOGE) | $0.1364 | -2.56% | +11.06% |
| Pudgy Penguins (PENGU) | $0.0140 | -3.37% | +25.17% |
Pudgy Penguins is priced via CoinGecko. The other five are Yahoo Finance.
Ethereum (ETH) barely moved at all, within a tenth of a per cent of where it started, at $2,691.63 USD in the same 7:05pm ET snapshot. Bitcoin added about a third of a per cent. Everything else came off. The three days together are the shape worth seeing, measured this time on US dollar daily bars:
| Asset | Thu Sep 24 | Fri Sep 25 | Sat Sep 26 (live bar) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin | 0.00% | -0.41% | +0.33% |
| Ethereum | +0.10% | +0.12% | +0.03% |
| XRP | +2.17% | +2.30% | -2.73% |
| Solana | +1.77% | +4.27% | -0.50% |
| Dogecoin | +3.30% | +3.34% | -2.43% |
Thursday and Friday the altcoins ran while the two largest assets did nothing. Saturday that reversed. One session settles nothing: XRP, Solana and Dogecoin are all still comfortably ahead of Bitcoin over seven days. Whether runs like this one tend to hold is a question with a measurable history, and what the last 22 altcoin runs actually delivered puts a base rate under it.
Bitcoin’s own week, on the same US dollar daily closes, peaked early:
| Day | Close (USD) |
|---|---|
| Sat Sep 19 | $81,233.68 |
| Sun Sep 20 | $81,142.61 |
| Mon Sep 21 | $86,602.91 |
| Tue Sep 22 | $86,172.28 |
| Wed Sep 23 | $84,383.01 |
| Thu Sep 24 | $84,379.06 |
| Fri Sep 25 | $84,034.92 |
| Sat Sep 26 (live bar) | $84,310.97 |
From last Saturday’s close, Bitcoin is up 3.79%. From Monday’s close it is down 2.65%, and from Monday’s intraday high of $87,363.76 it is down 3.49%. Monday’s jump was itself a weekend gap, which is why BTCC.B opened 4.18% higher that morning rather than trading its way there.
The tape was thin, as Saturdays usually are
There is no catalyst to point at. Nothing sat on the Canadian or US data calendar for a Saturday, and a move of a third of a per cent does not require one.
What can be measured is the tape it happened on. Bitcoin traded $14.78 billion USD today on a bar that was still live when these figures were taken, which would rank 9th lowest of the last 60 daily bars back to July 29. Its high-to-low range spanned 0.64%, 4th narrowest of the 60, and the three narrower ones are all Saturdays. Of those 60 bars, the six lowest-volume days are every one of them a Saturday or a Sunday: August 16 at $9.08 billion, August 15 at $10.03 billion, August 8 at $12.35 billion, September 12 at $12.66 billion, August 9 at $13.23 billion and August 1 at $13.55 billion.
Averaged across the 28 completed sessions from August 29 to September 25, four of each weekday, Monday through Friday run between $32.4 billion and $37.4 billion, Saturday averages $16.4 billion and Sunday $18.4 billion. On those four weeks the weekend traded at half the weekday rate. It is a tendency rather than a rule: Saturday August 22 put through $42.13 billion, more than 36 of the 43 weekday bars in the same 60-day window.
Average daily Bitcoin dollar volume by day of the week, the 28 completed sessions from August 29 to September 25, 2026. Source: Yahoo Finance daily volume for BTC-USD and our arithmetic on it.
That is the company the day’s narrow range keeps. It does not account for the direction, and a third of a per cent does not need an account of its direction.
What is ahead
The Bank of Canada’s next decision is Wednesday October 28. The policy rate has held at 2.25% since October 30, 2025, per the Bank of Canada’s key interest rate, and the last move was a cut, from 2.50%. What Montreal Exchange one-month CORRA futures now price is the opposite: a 47% chance of a hike at that meeting, an implied rate of 2.37%. A rate that the market puts closer to a coin toss than to a hold, and in the opposite direction to the last move, reaches Bitcoin through the Canadian dollar rather than through anything crypto-specific.
Statistics Canada publishes July GDP on Tuesday September 29 at 8:30am ET. The TSX, and BTCC.B with it, reopens Monday September 28 at 9:30am ET.
Disclaimer: The content on bestcanadianstocks.ca is for informational and entertainment purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. Past performance is not indicative of future results. Always consult a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions. Bitcoin and Ethereum quotes are a snapshot taken at 7:05 pm ET on September 26, 2026, from Yahoo Finance, not a close, because crypto trades continuously. Daily figures marked live come from a bar that had not finished when they were taken. The weekend study covers the 49 TSX closures between October 3, 2025 and September 18, 2026 that began with a regular Friday session, measured on Yahoo Finance hourly closes for Bitcoin in Canadian dollars and Yahoo Finance daily bars for BTCC.B. Pudgy Penguins is priced by CoinGecko.
