Social attention spikes precede larger intraday price moves in either direction

Instrumetriq Research Note. Using 362,813 coin-sessions from the Instrumetriq Tier 3 archive (204 days, 2025-12-15 to 2026-07-06, 278 crypto assets), we measure whether a surge in social attention on a coin precedes a larger intraday price move. When a coin's count of distinct posting authors rises to at least 6x its own recent baseline, the rate of a large intraday move (a price excursion of at least +/-4% in either direction) is roughly three to four times the normal-attention rate, and holds within every methodology regime and out-of-sample. The larger moves are symmetric in sign (up and down in similar proportion), so the association is with volatility and carries no directional information. Companion to the sentiment-direction null note. Reproduction code and free weekly samples are mirrored across GitHub, Hugging Face, Kaggle, and Zenodo. Full archive and current-month updates: instrumetriq.com.