What actually moves crypto

A coin has no earnings to miss and no supply story of barrels - so what moves it is not any prior track's drivers. It is flow, leverage and narrative, and the fastest of those is the one most readers underestimate.

The four forces

• Leverage cascades, the fast one: perpetual and futures liquidations force market buying or selling of spot in minutes - a move triggers liquidations, which push the move, which trigger more; module 3 explains the funding mechanics, module 4 the liquidation prices, and this lesson names the effect: derivatives most readers cannot trade routinely move the spot they can.
• Flows: capital entering or leaving the asset class as a whole - the tide that lifts or drops most coins together, driven by sentiment, on-ramp access and the institutional wrappers module 5 dates.
• Narratives: crypto reprices on stories - a sector's thesis, a protocol's promise, a coin's meme - to a degree no other market matches, because with no valuation anchor the story IS the valuation until it is not.
• The macro linkage: since the institutions arrived, crypto trades increasingly with risk assets and against the dollar and rates - a linkage that strengthens in institutional regimes and loosens when retail dominates, which module 5 makes a dated, regime-aware read.

The decomposition, crypto-shaped

The equity track split a move into market, sector and name. Crypto's version: the whole-market flow layer (most coins move with the tide), the sector-narrative layer (thematic baskets move together), the coin-specific layer (its own news), and - unique to this asset class - the leverage layer, which can dominate all three for minutes at a time and belongs to none of them. Reading a crypto move means asking which layer moved it, exactly as five tracks taught - with the leverage layer as the new, fast, often-decisive fourth.

The honest condition

Stated now, formalised in module 5: with no earnings and no anchor, crypto analysis cannot be the causal work commodities allowed - it is flow-reading, narrative-reading and positioning-reading, which is the FX track's crowd-reading with the volume turned up and the anchor removed. That is not a criticism; it is the asset's nature, and analysis that pretends otherwise - valuing a coin as if it had cash flows - is the category error module 5 exists to prevent.