The spread between the Coinbase USD tape and the Binance USDT tape. How BlockShield computes it daily, why the USDT basis is declared, and how streaks are counted.
The premium is the gap between what Bitcoin trades for on a US dollar venue and what it trades for on the largest offshore USDT venue, as a percentage of the offshore price.
It is read as a proxy for the relative strength of the US bid: persistent positive prints mean dollars are paying up, persistent negative prints mean the offshore tape is leading.
Both tapes are public, so this index is computed in house over its whole history rather than rented. A decade of candles took a handful of paginated requests once; after that it is one call a day.
The USDT basis is part of the number and the card says so. Coinbase trades against dollars and Binance against USDT, so when the stablecoin itself drifts from a dollar the premium moves with no change in US demand at all.
Ours is a daily-close definition. The widely quoted reference computes from intraday data, and on the day this was built its claimed streak and our daily-close streak differed by weeks. Both are honest answers to slightly different questions, so the question ours answers is written on the card and the streak is computed from our series.
Today's candle is running, not evidence. Until the UTC day closes, its premium is drawn flagged and excluded from every streak count.
A missing day is a hole, not a zero. Days where either tape is absent are excluded and counted, because a spread computed against a stale close on one side manufactures a premium out of a calendar mismatch.
A premium is a spread between two venues, not a measurement of flow. Nobody watched money arrive.
Stablecoin drift and venue-specific outages both move this number without moving demand. Read it against the stablecoin flow series rather than alone.
Streak counts here are computed from our own record and name the date they found. A hard-coded 'first since 2023' is a fact that silently expires.
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