ARXIV (Bruno Araujo dos Santos,Gabriele Di Antonio,Marco Alberto Javarone): Persistent structural regimes in Bitcoin transactions relate to market cycles Bitcoin's blockchain is a public record of every on-chain transaction, while the price of bitcoin is set by trading on external markets. We ask whether on-chain activity alone reveals regimes associated with market trends, and whether this association remains stable over time. We summarise each week of blockchain activity from 2012 to 2026 using four measures of transaction structure and fit a two-state hidden semi-Markov model without price data. The sole market-informed constraint is an asymmetry in regime persistence, motivated by the observation that Bitcoin's price increases tend to outlast its declines. During earlier market cycles, the inferred regimes exhibit distinct transaction structures and align with periods of rising and falling prices more closely than random sequences with the same regime-duration distributions. The ongoing downturn, however, breaks this correspondence: the blockchain remains in the longer-lived regime, while its transaction structure resembles neither previous downturns no... https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.16585v1

ARXIV (Saurabh Kumar): What Does It Cost to Force-Close a Lightning Channel? Evidence from 974,000 Channel Closes, 2018-2026 Bitcoin's Lightning payment network returns the funds of a channel that cannot close cooperatively through pre-signed transactions whose fees and delays fall on its operators. That fee design is being replaced: Bitcoin Core 31.0 removed the mempool rule anchor channels relied on, and the Lightning specification adopted zero-fee commitments in May 2026. What the old design costs has never been measured across fee regimes. We trace every public channel close and every force close on-chain from January 2018 to October 2026, 973,581 closes, and follow each output to its spend. A separate chain index confirms all 698,476 public closes we could compare. Fee spikes did not bring a wave of force closes. Force closes in a spike week and the next were 0.97 times the four weeks before, against 1.02 after ordinary weeks of the same years. A force close costs 2-6 times a cooperative close in fees and locks the closer's balance for days, which outweighs the fees only in low-fee years. When fees are high, pending payment... https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.16311v1

ARXIV (Carlos Baquero,Raquel Menezes): Deceleration without identification: testing a power-law trend in Bitcoin prices under persistent noise Plotted against time since its first block on logarithmic axes, the price of Bitcoin lies close to a straight line, and a power law in time has been proposed as its long-run trend. A good fit is weak evidence: when deviations from a trend are as persistent as a random walk, regressions on time find trends and high $R^2$ where none exist. We first bound what fifteen years of weekly prices can reveal, then test only what is answerable. Using a few low-frequency averages, invariant to the noise scale and calibrated over a declared family of persistent deviations with a four-year cycle and declining volatility, we test constant drift in expected log price against an added log-age term. The procedure was fixed, validated and publicly hashed before it was applied once. Constant drift is rejected under this family at nominal 5%, and a log-age coefficient of 5.7, close to the published exponent, is not rejected. The rejection does not survive allowing persistence beyond a random walk, and a Gompertz curve with a c... https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.13962v1