Bitcoin lost more than $4,000 between Thursday evening and the early hours of Friday 30 October. It traded near $80,950 at 17:29 UTC on 29 October, then fell below $77,000 and stood at $76,664 at 02:00 UTC, down 4.5% over 24 hours, according to The Block. By around 05:40 UTC it was back near $78,600, down 2.06% over 24 hours, according to Coindaro’s market data. That puts the bitcoin price today almost exactly on the level where most of the roughly $11 billion to $12 billion of Deribit options expiring at 08:00 UTC would do the least damage to sellers.
Two things broke Thursday’s calm. First came a weak finish for US tech: Alphabet was down almost 13% during the session, and Intel and Amazon fell after hours on their quarterly results. Then came the Binance hack, which The Block was reporting by about 21:49 UTC. The selling hit BNB, Binance’s own token, harder than anything else among the large coins.
The Binance story has its own article in this edition. In short: Binance puts the impact at about $6.3 billion and says about $3 billion has been frozen onchain. It says user funds are safe and that it will cover all losses with its SAFU emergency fund and company funds, Cointelegraph reported. Here we stay with what the night did to prices and what Friday still holds.
From $80,950 to $76,664: how the night unfolded
Our evening piece on Thursday’s US session left bitcoin near $81,000 after Alphabet’s drop and a strong US growth figure. At that point the market had absorbed bad news from Wall Street without breaking its range. That changed after the US close.
According to Cryptoast, which published at 22:38 UTC, bitcoin went from about $80,300 to under $78,800 within roughly an hour once the hack reports spread. At the time of its writing, BTC was at $78,741, ether at $2,263.89, SOL at $97.06 and XRP at $1.25. BNB had lost 6.3% in less than an hour, falling to $692 before bouncing to about $704. Cryptoast put the total crypto market at $2.62 trillion and wrote that more than $70 billion had gone in a day.
The low came later. Cointelegraph, in an update at 01:19 UTC citing CoinGecko, had bitcoin at about $77,131, ether near $2,217 and BNB near $693, down about 8.2% over 24 hours. At 02:00 UTC, The Block reported $76,664. We could not confirm the exact bottom from an exchange feed, so the safest statement is that bitcoin traded below $77,000, around $76,600, in the hour around 02:00 UTC.
Then the selling stopped. Between 02:00 UTC and around 05:40 UTC bitcoin recovered about $1,900. Its one-hour change in Coindaro’s data at that point was 0.12%: a market that had stopped falling, more than one buying back in.
Bitcoin price today against Thursday evening
The table compares three moments: the level in our Thursday evening report, the low area reported by The Block, and Coindaro’s market data around 05:40 UTC. Percentages in the last column are 24-hour changes at that time.
| Asset | 29 Oct, 17:29 UTC | 30 Oct, 02:00 UTC (The Block) | 30 Oct, around 05:40 UTC | 24h, around 05:40 UTC |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bitcoin (BTC) | $80,950 | $76,664 | $78,600 | -2.06% |
| Ether (ETH) | $2,343 | $2,190 | $2,246 | -3.45% |
| BNB | not recorded | $698.65 | $717.5 | -5.10% |
| XRP | $1.29 | $1.21 | $1.26 | -3.35% |
| Solana (SOL) | $101.3 | not reported | $98.06 | -2.45% |
BNB deserves a note. At the worst of the night it was down more than 8% over 24 hours, as Cointelegraph reported. By around 05:40 UTC the loss was 5.10%, with the token back above $717. Ether also recovered part of the move, from $2,190 at 02:00 UTC to about $2,246.
The wider market tells the same story. Total crypto capitalisation was $2.65 trillion in Coindaro’s 05:24 UTC market snapshot, down 4.46% in 24 hours, against $2.73 trillion in our Thursday evening report. Bitcoin’s share of the market stood at 59.4%, and the 24-hour losses of ether, XRP and BNB were all larger than bitcoin’s.
The Fear and Greed index stood at 30, in “fear” territory, at 05:24 UTC. It was at 51, neutral, on Thursday. Cointelegraph said the reading was the lowest since 14 August.
$1.55 billion of liquidations, almost all of them longs
Most of the drop was forced. Cryptoast, citing CoinGlass, counted $627.7 million of positions liquidated in a single hour on Thursday evening, $606.6 million of them bets on a rise. By 02:00 UTC the 24-hour total had reached $1.55 billion across 246,482 traders, with $1.34 billion on the long side, The Block reported, also citing CoinGlass. The largest single order closed was an $11.09 million BTCUSDT position on Binance.
For scale, the same 24-hour figure stood at $337.4 million on Thursday morning, according to data cited in our coverage that day. A liquidation happens when an exchange closes a leveraged position because the trader’s margin no longer covers the loss. Each forced sale pushes the price lower, which can trigger the next one. On a night when Binance had suspended deposits and withdrawals, that chain ran fast.
We found no reliable figure for funding rates or open interest overnight. On Thursday at 11:11 UTC, before any of this, open interest in perpetual futures was down 1.9% and funding was positive but falling. Whether the night cleared out leverage or only moved it is a question the next data will answer.
Wall Street had already weakened the market
The hack did not hit a calm market. On Thursday, Alphabet traded at $283.17 at 17:42 UTC, down 12.84% intraday, after missing on adjusted earnings and revenue. At the same moment the Nasdaq Composite was down 1.47% and the S&P 500 down 0.50%. We did not find confirmed closing figures for the indices at the time of writing.
After the bell, two more results added to the pressure. Intel fell about 17% in after-hours trading, according to Criptovaluta.it, after guiding fourth-quarter sales to $15 billion to $16 billion, against $17 billion to $18 billion expected. Amazon also fell after hours. The same outlet reported earnings of $1.89 a share against $1.96 expected, and advertising revenue below forecasts.
Bitcoin had held near $81,000 through Alphabet’s fall. What it could not absorb was a second shock, at night, from inside the crypto industry. Its own 30-day record was already weak for the rest of the market: Cryptoast noted that before the hack alerts ether was down 15.42% over 30 days, XRP 16.13% and SOL 18.04%, against 5.52% for bitcoin.
What moved besides bitcoin
Some wallet.">decentralised finance tokens fell harder than the majors. Cointelegraph reported AAVE down 11.3% to $118.54 and UNI down 10.4% to $6.48. Aave said it had frozen new deposits and new borrowing on its community-run V3 and V4 markets as a precaution, adding that its contracts were not affected and that users could still withdraw and repay loans.
Coindaro’s data around 05:40 UTC showed CRV down 16.81% and CVX down 16.86% over 24 hours. Both belong to the Curve ecosystem. None of our sources explains the drop, and we have no evidence linking it to Binance.
A few tokens went the other way. IRYS was up 38.83%, HYPE, the token of the Hyperliquid exchange, 17.29%, and RUNE 14.34% over the same 24 hours, again according to Coindaro’s data. None of those moves came with an announcement we could find.
The $11 billion Deribit expiry lands right on max pain
At 08:00 UTC the monthly bitcoin options on Deribit expire. Estimates of their size differ because open interest changes every day. Our Thursday report put the expiry at about $11 billion, some 135,000 BTC of contracts, with a max pain of $78,000. CryptoTicker, in a version updated on 29 October, counted 149,686 contracts worth $12.2 billion of notional value: 98,552 calls and 51,134 puts, a put-call ratio of 0.52, and a max pain of $79,000.
Max pain is the price at which the largest amount of options expires worthless, which is the outcome that costs option sellers least. At about $78,600 around 05:40 UTC, bitcoin sat between the two estimates. A week ago, when it traded above $80,000, the same level was still below the market.
The structure of the expiry is lopsided. The biggest call strikes are far away, according to CryptoTicker: 25,570 contracts at $95,000, 15,254 at $90,000 and 14,330 at $100,000. Those will all expire worthless. On the put side the largest strikes are $70,000 (4,142 contracts), $72,000 and $75,000, both just over 3,000. Our Thursday report noted that Decrypt estimated the real settlement effect at about $130 million, around 1% of the headline figure, because most contracts are out of the money.
Bank of Japan holds at 1.25%, with one vote for a hike
The Bank of Japan kept its policy rate at around 1.25% on Friday, by eight votes to one, according to its statement on monetary policy. The meeting ended at 11:55 Tokyo time (02:55 UTC) and the statement came out at 12:02, or 03:02 UTC. Board member Takata Hajime voted against and proposed a rise to 1.5%, saying the Bank needed to move its rate closer to neutral faster now that underlying inflation had reached its target.
Its board also decided, unanimously, to speed up the sale of its holdings of exchange-traded funds. From January 2027 it will sell about 860 billion yen a year at book value, against about 330 billion yen now. The hold was expected. Criptovaluta.it noted that it follows a September hike and that most economists surveyed by Bloomberg expect the next move in December. Japan’s 10-year yield was 2.834% on Thursday.
For bitcoin, the hold removes one possible surprise from the morning. Bond markets were already tense: the US 10-year Treasury yield stood at 4.999% at 17:27 UTC on Thursday.
Euro-area flash data and US labour costs follow
The European morning brings Eurostat’s flash estimate of third-quarter GDP for the euro area, together with flash October inflation and unemployment. FinanceCalendar lists the release at 10:00 UTC; Eurostat’s own note does not give the time. Inflation was 3.8% in September, and the European Central Bank kept its deposit rate at 2.50% on Thursday, so the October inflation number is the one that matters for its next meeting.
At 12:30 UTC the US Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the third-quarter employment cost index, according to its release schedule. We did not find a published consensus. The index tracks wages and benefits, and the Fed watches it as a measure of wage pressure behind inflation. The Fed held its rate at 3.75% to 4.00% on 28 October with two votes for a hike, as our report on the Fed decision described.
One token unlock is scheduled for today: BeInCrypto lists 229.17 million Kamino (KMNO) tokens, worth about $9.69 million, or 2.73% of the released supply. We could not open the full calendar to check other unlocks.
What we still do not know
Several numbers that would complete the picture are missing. The flows of the US spot bitcoin ETFs for Thursday were not confirmed when this was written; the last confirmed day, 28 October, showed net inflows of $137 million, according to SoSoValue data cited by Cointelegraph. ETF holders bought on average around $81,500 to just under $82,000, according to estimates cited in our earlier coverage, so with bitcoin near $78,600 around 05:40 UTC the average holder is below cost.
The size of the hack itself is also still being counted, which is why the next statements from Binance matter for prices. Cryptoast recalled a precedent: after the Bybit hack of February 2025, about $1.5 billion, bitcoin briefly fell under $95,000 and was back above $96,000 within 48 hours. Whether this night follows that pattern depends on how fast Binance reopens withdrawals and how much of the money stays frozen.
On the chart, the levels cited in our Thursday coverage still frame the day. Thursday’s Asian low of about $79,600 was broken overnight and now sits above the price. Below, about $75,800 is the average purchase cost of more recent buyers, and $70,000 holds the largest cluster of puts. Our page on bitcoin (BTC) shows the live price.
The next dates
- 08:00 UTC today: Deribit monthly expiry, about $11 billion to $12 billion depending on the source.
- 10:00 UTC today: euro-area flash GDP for the third quarter and flash October inflation, per FinanceCalendar.
- 12:30 UTC today: US employment cost index for the third quarter.
- Sunday 1 November, 00:00 UTC: bitcoin’s monthly candle closes. US clocks go back an hour the same day, so the New York open moves to 14:30 UTC.
- Friday 6 November, 13:30 UTC: US jobs report for October.
The next Fed decision is due on 9 December, after a meeting starting on 8 December.