Majors have healed, the rest of the market has not
One year after the largest liquidation event in crypto history, the market’s plumbing tells a split story. Bitcoin and ether order books now hold more resting liquidity than on the day of the crash, or at the start of either 2025 or 2026, according to CoinDesk Research. Smaller tokens and spot trading activity, however, have not followed them back.
The findings, published to mark the anniversary of the Oct. 10, 2025 flash crash, show a market that has rebuilt its core infrastructure around the two largest assets while the long tail of altcoins continues to thin out. For traders and institutions, the message is increasingly clear: depth has consolidated into the majors, and the divergence looks set to persist.
The crash itself was brutal in its speed. Days after hitting a record high above $126,000, bitcoin had edged back to $122,600 on the morning of Oct. 10, 2025. Hours later it had plunged below $105,000, with much of the decline coming in minutes during thin Friday evening trade in the United States, after President Donald Trump announced 100% tariffs on Chinese imports. More than $19 billion in leveraged positions were liquidated in a single day, the largest such event the industry has recorded.
Crypto’s liquidity vanished in hours. Where it would next settle was the open question. A year on, there is an answer.
The numbers behind the recovery
To gauge the recovery, CoinDesk Research compared market depth across major centralized exchanges on four dates: Jan. 1, 2025; Oct. 10, 2025; Jan. 1, 2026; and this week. Depth measures the value of buy and sell orders resting near the current price. The deeper the book, the more volume a large trade can absorb without moving the market, which is precisely what failed on crash day.
Bitcoin’s order book is deeper now than on any of those earlier dates. On Oct. 7, about $11.7 million sat within 1% of the price. That is roughly 75% more than on crash day a year earlier, up from about $9 million at the start of this year and about $6.9 million at the start of 2025.
Crucially, this is not a price effect. Bitcoin is about one-third cheaper than it was before the crash, so a deeper book measured in dollars reflects more capital actually committed by market makers, not simply less valuable coins. “The majors’ deepening is real capital, not a price effect,” said CoinDesk Researcher Saksham Diwan.
The improvement is concentrated near the price, where market makers quote most actively. Further out, at 5% from the price, depth of around $24 million is roughly where it was in January 2025. That pattern suggests market makers have prioritised tight, competitive quoting in the most traded bands, rather than spreading capital across the whole book.
Ether’s recovery is in some ways stronger. Depth within 0.5% of the price has more than doubled since crash day, to about $4.2 million. At 1%, it has risen by about three-quarters to roughly $5.3 million, above both January readings. For an asset that often trades in bitcoin’s shadow, the ether book’s rehabilitation is notable, and it aligns with the broader institutional tilt toward the majors that has defined the past year.
The rebuilt books received an early stress test this week. As the market sold off, bitcoin’s 1% depth fell about 12% between Oct. 7 and Oct. 8. Ether’s tightest band thinned slightly, though orders further from the price actually increased. A modest wobble, in other words, rather than a repeat of the evaporation seen a year ago. Readers tracking the broader market response can follow developments in our Bitcoin coverage.
Altcoins and spot volumes tell a different story
For altcoins, the picture is reversed. In CoinDesk Research’s basket of altcoins, dollar depth was greatest on Jan. 1, 2025, and has been lower on each date measured since. Depth at 5% from the price is down about a third since the start of 2025, to around $2 million. Closer to the price, at 1%, it has fallen by about a sixth.
Measured in token terms, altcoin depth looks healthier: it peaked on Jan. 1 this year and has eased only modestly since. But analysts said that token-unit recovery was mostly a function of falling prices, which mask a steady erosion of committed capital. In other words, the same number of tokens resting on the book is worth considerably fewer dollars, and fewer market makers are willing to underwrite altcoin order flow at scale.
Spot trading has not recovered either. Weekly spot volume on centralized exchanges averaged around $279 billion over the four weeks to Sept. 27, according to CoinDesk Research, nearly two-thirds below the $801 billion traded in the week of the crash. Activity bottomed out in August, when weekly volume fell to around $135 billion, and has roughly doubled since. But it remains well short of the levels seen around the crash.
The combination is telling. Even as the deepest books in the market have strengthened, overall participation has contracted. The market that has emerged from the wreckage of Oct. 10, 2025 is one where capital concentrates in bitcoin and ether, and where the marginal altcoin trade faces wider effective spreads and thinner absorption capacity.
What it means for the year ahead
Joshua de Vos, research lead at CoinDesk, framed the anniversary in direct terms. “A year ago, we wrote that liquidity was thin and fragmented, and that it was unclear where capital would rotate once the dust settled. We now have an answer: bitcoin and ether,” he said. “Market makers have returned to majors, with liquidity above pre-crash levels, whilst altcoin liquidity continues to trend down as a whole. Beyond a select few alts, I expect this divergence to persist into next year as majors continue to dominate institutional interest and volumes.”
The market implications are straightforward. Deeper bitcoin and ether books mean large institutional orders can be executed with less slippage, which in turn makes those venues more attractive to the institutional flows that regulators in the United States and elsewhere have increasingly channelled into regulated products. Liquidity begets liquidity, and the majors now sit firmly inside that loop.
Altcoins sit outside it. Falling dollar depth means a large sell order in a mid-cap token moves the price more today than it would have two years ago, raising the cost of entry for exactly the kind of sizeable, risk-managed capital that projects need. The erosion also complicates the listing economics of exchanges, which face thinner books and reduced spot turnover on the same long tail of assets.
The regulatory backdrop reinforces the trend rather than countering it. Compliance, custody and reporting costs weigh more heavily on thinly traded assets, and market makers allocate scarce capital where the risk-adjusted return is best. That calculation currently favours the majors by a wide margin.
The takeaway
A year on from the $19 billion liquidation event, the crypto market has not so much recovered as reorganised. Bitcoin and ether order books are deeper in dollar terms than before the crash, despite lower prices, which points to genuine capital returning to the majors. Altcoin depth has fallen steadily since early 2025, and spot volumes sit roughly two-thirds below their crash-week peak even after doubling from an August low. The divergence between the majors and everything else is the defining structural feature of the post-crash market, and on the current evidence it is set to widen rather than close in the year ahead.
