Start here: Brief, Signals, Risk Radar and Markets

You sign in, the app loads, and the sidebar has more tabs than you have attention for on a first visit. Northtape is built around four screens that each answer a different question about the market, and knowing which does what turns that wall of tabs into a short daily routine. Here is what each screen is for, in the order it makes sense to meet them.

Which screen should you open first?

Open the Brief first. It is the home screen and the widest view — the live, ranked news feed — so it is the natural landing spot before you narrow in. From there, Signals turns that feed into a short written summary, Markets covers prices, and Risk Radar watches for trouble. You do not need all four every day; you need to know which one answers the question you have right now.

Brief: the whole market, ranked and de-noised

The Brief is Northtape's home screen and its news desk. It gathers crypto, fintech, blockchain and regulation stories from multiple sources into one ranked feed, with category tabs for crypto, DeFi, stablecoins, regulation and fintech, a search box, and a market-pulse strip across the top. It refreshes every 5 minutes and needs no sign-in to read. Any article can be expanded into an AI summary: a 40-word TL;DR, a few key points, a sentiment tag describing the article's tone, and two to four short quotes lifted verbatim from the source and checked against it before you ever see them. The Brief answers one question: what is happening across the market right now?

Signals: your daily brief, written and cited

Signals is the daily brief the AI writes for you, and its name sits confusingly close to the Brief screen, so hold the difference clearly: the Brief is the raw feed, Signals is a short written summary drawn from it. You pick the categories you care about, and it reads the last 36 hours of news (up to 25 articles), then returns a headline, a short overview, and three to five themed sections. Every section cites the specific numbered articles behind it, so each claim is one tap from its source. Anything on your watchlist is folded in automatically, and a risk note flags regulatory or market stress worth knowing. Signals is cached for the day, so re-reading it costs nothing. It needs a sign-in, because it is built around your own categories and watchlist.

Markets: prices, moves and a liquidity check

Markets is the price screen: live prices, 24-hour moves and 7-day sparklines for the top 100 assets by market cap. You can filter to gainers, losers, or the ones marked Tradeable. The Tradeable marker is a liquidity screen, not a recommendation: a coin earns it only when it sits in the top 100 by market cap and clears at least US$10 million in 24-hour trading volume. That matters because a high market cap on its own does not mean you could actually buy or sell a real position without moving the price. A coin can lose the Tradeable marker on a quiet day and regain it the next without anything about the project itself changing.

Risk Radar: the four risks worth a standing watch

Risk Radar filters the same news desk into four standing views of what could go wrong: regulation, counterparty stress across exchanges and custodians, stablecoin health, and protocol and chain risk. Each lens shows the latest matching headlines plus a count of how many landed in the last 48 hours, which is an activity level and deliberately not an invented risk score. The screen refreshes every 5 minutes and is rule-based and transparent by design: it shows you what it matched and why. It is informational only, never a trading signal. The point is to see a brewing problem early, not to be told what to do about it.

How the four screens fit together

Used together, the four screens form a funnel from wide to narrow. The Brief shows everything; Signals compresses it into a written daily read; Markets grounds it in prices and liquidity; Risk Radar isolates the failure modes. A common routine is two minutes on Signals for the shape of the day, a glance at Markets for anything on your watchlist, and Risk Radar only when a headline makes you want to check. Two more tabs sit alongside them: Ask, an AI analyst grounded in the same live news and market data, and your Watchlist, which syncs your tracked assets and keyword alerts across the other screens.

FAQs

Do I need an account to use Northtape? No. The Brief and Markets screens are readable without signing in. An account only adds the personalised parts: Signals built around your categories, a synced watchlist, keyword alerts, and the Ask analyst.

What's the difference between the Brief and Signals? The Brief is the live, ranked news feed, which is the raw material. Signals is a short daily brief the AI writes from that feed, grouped into themed sections with a citation for every claim. Read the Brief to scan; read Signals for a summary.

What does the Tradeable marker mean? It is a liquidity screen: the coin sits in the top 100 by market cap and has traded at least US$10 million in the last 24 hours. It is not a recommendation, and a coin can gain or lose it day to day as volume shifts.

Is anything on Northtape financial advice? No. Every screen is informational. The sentiment tags, the Risk Radar activity counts and the Markets data all describe the market; they do not tell you to buy, sell or hold anything.

None of this is investment advice. Northtape is a news and market-information desk, not a broker, exchange, custodian or adviser, and everything above describes what the app shows rather than recommending any action on any asset.