Bitcoin slipped under $81,000 late on Friday 23 October, about two hours after Wall Street closed, and spent the first hours of the weekend just above $80,400. On Coinbase it went from $81,280 at 22:00 UTC to $80,452 within that hour, then printed a low of $80,401 in the 23:00 UTC hour, below Thursday’s low of $80,789. At 04:53 UTC on Saturday it traded at $80,810, according to Coinbase’s public ticker.
No outlet we checked had reported a trigger for the move by early Saturday morning, and we have not found one. What we can describe is the setting around it: a Dow Jones down about 1.2% on oil, American Express and telecom stocks, Brent at its highest since April, a 10-year Treasury yield just under 5%, and a first, incomplete reading of Friday’s spot bitcoin ETF flows that showed a small outflow of $27.6 million.
The Thursday outflow of $635 million from the spot funds was already told here on Friday. Compared with 04:29 UTC on Friday, when bitcoin stood near $81,600, the price at 04:53 UTC on Saturday was about $790, or 1%, lower.
How bitcoin went from $81,300 to $80,401 after the US close
Friday itself was quiet. Through the European and US hours bitcoin held a band of about $1,000, which our Friday evening analysis of the US session described while it was happening. That piece was written at 16:50 UTC, so it could not see what came next.
At the 20:00 UTC close of the New York stock market, bitcoin was still at $81,311. The hour after was flat. Then, in the 22:00 UTC candle, the price fell from $81,343 to $80,452, a drop of about $890 from the top of the hour, on volume of 350 BTC on Coinbase. The 23:00 UTC hour brought the low of the move at $80,401 before a bounce to $81,078. A second leg followed at midnight: the 00:00 UTC candle on Saturday opened at $81,080 and closed at $80,508.
| Hour (UTC) | Open | High | Low | Close | Volume (BTC) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 23 Oct 20:00 | $81,184 | $81,400 | $81,151 | $81,311 | 229 |
| 23 Oct 21:00 | $81,311 | $81,400 | $81,224 | $81,280 | 137 |
| 23 Oct 22:00 | $81,280 | $81,343 | $80,452 | $80,719 | 350 |
| 23 Oct 23:00 | $80,758 | $81,095 | $80,401 | $81,078 | 329 |
| 24 Oct 00:00 | $81,080 | $81,106 | $80,479 | $80,508 | 353 |
| 24 Oct 01:00 | $80,508 | $80,860 | $80,502 | $80,823 | 137 |
| 24 Oct 02:00 | $80,823 | $80,895 | $80,719 | $80,889 | 61 |
| 24 Oct 03:00 | $80,889 | $80,988 | $80,736 | $80,866 | 94 |
| 24 Oct 04:00 | $80,866 | $80,988 | $80,721 | $80,783 | 87 |
Source: Coinbase Exchange hourly candles for BTC-USD, read at 04:53 UTC on 24 October; the 04:00 UTC candle was still open.
On the daily chart, Friday’s UTC session opened at $81,306 and closed at $81,078, a loss of only 0.3%. The range was wider. Between the high of $81,962 and the late low, bitcoin covered $1,561 in a day, half again as much as the band seen during trading hours in Europe and New York.
The Saturday Asia session, if it can be called one, added little. Asian stock exchanges are shut on Saturdays, so the crypto market traded on its own. After the midnight leg, prices moved between $80,500 and $81,000 on volumes of 60 to 140 BTC an hour, a fraction of Friday’s flow.
What we do not know about the drop
A cause is the first gap: we searched the main crypto outlets and the news feeds up to 04:53 UTC and found no report on the move, and we will not guess at one. Nor do we know the size of the liquidations it set off. The last liquidation total we could read was CoinGlass’s 24-hour figure of $331 million at 16:39 UTC on Friday, before the drop, so it says nothing about the night. Friday’s final ETF figure is also still open, as explained below.
Friday’s close: oil, AmEx and telecoms pulled the Dow down 1.2%
Wall Street ended a rough week with a split market. At 2:01 p.m. New York time (18:01 UTC), Reuters had the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 626 points, or 1.18%, at 52,241.55, the S&P 500 down 0.43% and the Nasdaq Composite almost flat, according to its report carried by MarketScreener. The last quotes on that page, stamped 4:38 p.m. New York time, show the Dow at 52,215.16 (down 1.23%) and the S&P 500 at 7,623.68 (down 0.52%). The Street, in its close report published at 23:20 UTC, gave the Nasdaq down 0.2% and the Russell 2000 down 0.3%.
The selling came from outside tech. American Express fell 3.9% after announcing it would cut 5% of its workforce, even though it raised its profit forecast. AT&T and T-Mobile both lost more than 6% and Verizon 1.6%, after a report that SpaceX is looking for thousands of cell sites to build a fourth US carrier. Chip stocks, the centre of Thursday’s slide, rose 0.6% on the Philadelphia semiconductor index. “There is still fallout from the questioning of the AI trade,” Kristina Hooper, chief market strategist at Man Group, told Reuters.
Oil did the rest. Brent reached its highest level since late April after Houthi attacks in Saudi Arabia, Reuters reported. The futures contract settled at $116.72 a barrel, up 3.1% and the highest settlement since 29 April, according to CNBC; a Reuters-based report gave the same figure. On Thursday Brent had ended near $113. US crude (WTI) added 3.8% to settle at $103.27, CNBC said, and energy was the best sector of the day, up 2.5%, according to The Street.
Rates moved with oil. The 10-year Treasury yield rose 4 basis points to 4.999%, a whisker under 5%, and the 30-year to 5.33%, The Street reported. Over the week the 10-year still fell 11 basis points. Gold futures, for their part, posted their lowest close since 15 July; the metal and bitcoin both lost ground this week, which points to rates and oil rather than to a flight from risk.
For bitcoin, one level from earlier in the week matters. Glassnode estimates the average cost of the coins held by the US spot ETFs at about $81,500, according to CryptoSlate. Every hourly close from 18:00 UTC on Friday onward has been below that figure.
Spot bitcoin ETF flows on Friday: a small first print, and an incomplete one
The first reading of Friday’s flows is modest. Farside Investors’ data, shown on the 21 BTC mirror at 03:20 UTC on Saturday, gives a net outflow of $27.6 million: $31.8 million out of Fidelity’s FBTC, $4.2 million into MSBT, and zero for the other funds that had reported. BlackRock’s IBIT and VanEck’s HODL had not yet reported at that time, so the total will change. Farside’s own site and SoSoValue were not readable by us on Saturday morning, which leaves this as a single, secondary source.
| Day (2026) | Net flow, US spot bitcoin ETFs |
|---|---|
| Mon 19 Oct | +$526.7M |
| Tue 20 Oct | +$23.2M |
| Wed 21 Oct | +$524.8M |
| Thu 22 Oct | -$635.6M |
| Fri 23 Oct (preliminary) | -$27.6M |
| Five days | +$411.5M |
Source: Farside Investors via 21btc.cc, pulled 24 October at 03:20 UTC; the five-day total is the sum of those rows. Trackers differ slightly. SoSoValue’s figures, used by The Block, count Wednesday at $528.4 million and the week to Thursday at $442.7 million.
If the first print holds, sellers did not follow Thursday’s exit, the largest since June, but buyers did not come back either. Over the week the funds still took in about $0.4 billion while the price went the other way, from $82,938 at the Coinbase daily close on 20 October to $80,810 at 04:53 UTC on Saturday.
Traders quoted by The Block on Friday had already drawn the line. “If inflows fade and that floor breaks, the demand picture has weakened,” Lorris Beziers of Tesseract Group said of the $80,000 to $81,000 zone. Jeff Anderson of STS Digital was calmer: “We do not read a lot into this move, with $80K/$86K being the recent channel as we watch for a breakout of those levels.”
One more detail shapes the weekend. US exchange-traded funds do not trade on Saturday or Sunday, so no ETF demand can reach the market before Monday 26 October. For readers new to these products, our explainer on crypto ETFs covers how creations and redemptions turn into bitcoin bought or sold.
Ether, XRP and the rest of the market overnight
The large coins moved less than bitcoin’s range suggests. In our market snapshot at 04:21 UTC, bitcoin was down 1.00% over 24 hours and 0.64% over seven days. Ether traded at $2,380 (down 0.73%), Solana at $102.7 (down 1.21%), XRP at $1.29 (down 2.06%) and BNB at $739.1, flat. Bitcoin’s share of the market stood at 59.5%.
The same feed shows the total crypto market value at $2.73 trillion, down 3.78% in 24 hours. That decline does not match the moves of the majors, which make up most of the total, and may come from the data provider’s calculation or from small tokens. We do not treat it as a measure of the night. The Fear and Greed index stood at 51, neutral, against 50 on Friday.
The outliers were small tokens. IRYS rose 277% in 24 hours, the largest gain in the snapshot, with no announcement found so far; it gets its own piece this morning. Worldcoin’s WLD lost 12.30%, and we found no reported cause for that drop either.
The week ahead: the Fed on Wednesday, GDP and PCE on Thursday, midterms on 3 November
The coming week is busier than the last. On Monday 26 October the ETFs reopen and the full Friday figure should be known. On Tuesday 27 October the Federal Reserve starts its two-day meeting, and the date also marks the planned start of Franklin Templeton’s FBEQ and FIBT, two ETFs that move stock dividends into bitcoin.
Wednesday 28 October is the main date. The Fed’s decision is due at 18:00 UTC and Chair Kevin Warsh’s press conference at 18:30 UTC. Markets expect no change: CME FedWatch gave an 88.9% chance of a hold at 17:00 UTC on Friday, and The Street put it at 91% at the close, with about 78% for a rate increase in December. The two hold figures were read at different times of the day.
On Thursday 29 October the US publishes its first estimate of third-quarter growth and September’s PCE inflation index, both at 8:30 a.m. New York time (12:30 UTC), according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis release schedule. Strategy, the largest corporate holder of bitcoin, said in an 8 October release that it will report third-quarter results after the US close that day and hold a webinar at 5 p.m. New York time. Around a third of S&P 500 companies report next week, among them Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon, Reuters said.
Two dates sit just beyond the week. The US midterm elections take place on Tuesday 3 November, and Reuters and The Street both tie part of the oil premium to that date. And Zcash’s NU7 upgrade, set for block 3,543,405, is expected around 5 to 6 November, by our estimate from the block height.
The levels traders are watching into Monday
None of the figures above is a forecast. They are the reference points that the sources quoted here keep returning to. On the downside, Friday’s low of $80,401 is the first, and $80,000 is the second, the floor that Tesseract’s Beziers describes. On the upside, the ETF cost basis near $81,500 has sat above every hourly close since 18:00 UTC on Friday. STS Digital’s channel runs from $80,000 to $86,000.
Weekend markets are thin, and Saturday’s volumes so far are among the lowest of the week. The next firm data point for bitcoin demand arrives on Monday, when the final Friday ETF figure and the first flows of the new week come out, two days before the Fed.