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Vol. I · No. 6The Terminal

The Basis Ledger

“Markets, measured.”Sunday, September 20, 2026

Perpetuals
13:22 UTC
BTC80,481.4▼0.93%f 0.0084%ETH2,578.1▼2.22%f 0.0030%SOL108.160▼2.98%f 0.0100%XRP1.378▼4.50%f 0.0063%BNB752.010▼2.44%f 0.0006%DOGE0.08495▼4.62%f 0.0100%HYPE91.063▼1.37%f 0.0050%

ORDER FLOW

One candle, two tapes: spot and the perpetual disagree about who was buying

The same fifteen minutes of Bitcoin read +61% delta on spot and +22% on the perpetual. On NEAR, the sign flipped. A volume figure without a market attached is not a figure.

By Basis Desk4 min read

A volume figure without a market attached is not a figure. Neither is a delta, a point of control, or a high and a low. Spot and the perpetual are two different books with two different sets of participants, and they print two different tapes for the same minute of the same asset.

This is easy to agree with and easy to forget, because the price lines look identical. So here is one candle, read twice.

Binance, 20 September 2026, 05:00 to 05:15 UTC. Both reads cover the whole quarter hour, and both separate buying from selling by the venue's own aggressor tag rather than inferring it from where the bar closed.

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Options, explained

Max Pain Measures a Payout, Not a Destination.

The strike that minimises what option writers owe is a real calculation with a real use — and it is not a price target. A live Deribit board shows why.

By Basis Desk5 min read

From the desk

What this paper is.

The Ledger is written by the desk at Basis, the people who build the terminal. It holds to one rule: a claim about the market arrives with the chart, the funding rate or the positioning behind it, and an argument that the evidence cannot carry is not made.

Beside it runs the wire, gathered from the major crypto desks, grouped when several report one story and ranked by what the story is rather than how loudly it is written. Paid posts are left out, and every headline links to the desk that wrote it.

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