Bitcoin holds near $82,000 as Korea’s Kospi falls more than 3% and ETF buyers return with $527 million

Bitcoin traded near $81,890 on Coinbase at 05:29 UTC on Tuesday 20 October, after a night spent in a band of about $1,090, while South Korea’s Kospi fell more than 3% in another sell-off in chip stocks. The money that had been leaving US spot bitcoin ETFs for two weeks came back on Monday: a net $526.7 million, according to Farside data, almost all of it into BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT). US spot ether ETFs lost a net $103.3 million on the same day, SoSoValue figures show.

That puts the bitcoin price today about where it was when Wall Street closed on Monday. Coindaro’s own market snapshot at 05:11 UTC showed about $81,930, down roughly 0.8% over 24 hours and 1.46% over seven days. Ether stood at $2,405, down less than 1% on the day, and the whole crypto market was worth $2.76 trillion. The Fear and Greed index read 55, in its neutral zone.

Our analysis of Monday’s US session described the ETFs as the missing buyer. The buyer turned up in the data after the close, through one fund, and the price did not follow it overnight. Asian stocks, not ETF buying, set the tone of the night.

Bitcoin price today: a 1.3% range while Asian chip stocks sold off

Coinbase hourly candles show how small the move was. Bitcoin opened the 20:00 UTC hour, when Wall Street closed, at $81,769. It slipped to $81,080.64 in the 01:00 UTC hour, Seoul’s second hour of trading, and climbed back to $82,173.84 in the 04:00 UTC hour. From the US close to 05:29 UTC, low to high, that is roughly 1.3%.

Ether moved the same way. Its overnight low on Coinbase was $2,369.51 in the 01:00 UTC hour, its high $2,414.70 in the 22:00 UTC hour on Monday, and it traded at $2,404 at 05:29 UTC. A Reuters report from Tokyo, filed in the Asian morning, had bitcoin 0.67% lower at $81,386.40, close to the night’s low.

Wall Street gave back part of its afternoon gain before the close. The Nasdaq Composite ended up 1.1% at 26,430.89 and the S&P 500 up 0.4% at 7,690.73, while the Dow slipped 0.1% to 51,966.03, according to the AP closing report. The 10-year Treasury yield finished at 5.14%, against 5.09% on Friday, the same AP report said.

None of the Asian figures below is a close. Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong and Shanghai were still trading when this piece was written, so each figure comes with its source and the time it refers to.

Bitcoin ETF inflows: $526.7 million on Monday, carried by IBIT

Read the number with one detail in mind: IBIT took in more than the whole category. BlackRock’s fund recorded a net $665.2 million of creations, while Fidelity’s FBTC lost $83.6 million and Grayscale’s GBTC $54.9 million, in Farside’s table relayed by Blockchain.News. Every other US spot bitcoin fund showed no flow, and the three figures add up to the $526.7 million total. SoSoValue’s count, reported by PANews, gives the same picture: $527 million net, $665 million into IBIT, $83.6 million out of FBTC.

US spot bitcoin ETFs held $105.46 billion of assets after Monday, about 6.4% of bitcoin’s market value, with cumulative net inflows of $57.41 billion since they launched, SoSoValue figures show. IBIT’s own cumulative net inflow reached $66.23 billion.

The size stands out against last week. The best day of that week was Tuesday 13 October, at $175.6 million, in the daily table kept by TFTC; Monday’s figure is three times that. The week as a whole still ended with a net outflow of $228.6 million, the second in a row. One day of buying does not make a trend, and it came on a day when bitcoin made no new high. That is our reading of the data, not a forecast.

Ether funds kept losing money. US spot ether ETFs recorded a net outflow of about $103.3 million on Monday, their fourth straight day of outflows, according to PANews, citing SoSoValue. BlackRock’s ETHA accounted for $95.4 million of it and Fidelity’s FETH for $6 million. The ether funds held about $14.77 billion.

For newcomers: an ETF inflow means the fund issued new shares because buyers wanted more of it than sellers offered, and a spot bitcoin ETF then has to hold more bitcoin to match. Our glossary entry on crypto ETFs explains how creations and redemptions work.

Listed companies, the other large source of demand earlier this year, have slowed down. Strategy added a net 1,666 BTC in the third quarter against 83,901 BTC in the second, according to its filings. Other public companies added a net 5,617 BTC against 45,725 BTC, and spot bitcoin ETFs took in about $6.4 billion net over the quarter, figures from Bitwise’s head of research Ryan Rasmussen show, as cited by Cointelegraph. Jag Kooner, head of derivatives at Bitfinex, told the outlet: “A return to last year’s indiscriminate capital raising looks unlikely.”

On the product side, BlackRock filed on Monday for an iShares Bitcoin Managed Protection ETF (ticker PBIT), which would use options to cushion about 10% of losses and cap gains. Coindaro covers the filing in a separate piece this morning.

Kospi today: Seoul sells the AI trade again, down 4% by 05:15 UTC

The heaviest selling was in South Korea. By 10:30 in Seoul (01:30 UTC), the Kospi had lost 3.2% to 5,587.27, after trading as low as 5,493.24, Ajupress reported. Reuters had it 3.61% lower around 02:15 UTC. The fall deepened later: Yahoo Finance quote data showed the index at 5,535.00 at 05:15 UTC, down 4.04%, a little over an hour before the 06:30 UTC close.

Memory makers took the hit. SK hynix fell 3.6% to 1,231,000 won by 01:30 UTC and briefly traded below 1.2 million won for the first time in nearly six months, while Samsung Electronics lost 1.5% to 214,500 won, according to Ajupress. At 05:15 UTC SK hynix stood at 1,217,000 won, down 4.7%, on Yahoo Finance data. Ajupress tied the drop to reports that Solidigm, SK hynix’s NAND flash unit, had picked Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley for a possible US listing, which investors fear could take value away from the parent.

Foreign investors were net sellers of 605.8 billion won (about $456 million) by 01:30 UTC and institutions of 470.7 billion won, while individuals bought a net 832.1 billion won. The won still firmed 0.3% to 1,328.90 per dollar.

It is the second sharp fall in a week. On Tuesday 13 October the Kospi closed down 5.46% at 6,035.35, with SK hynix down 10.09% and the first sell-side sidecar in nearly two months, the Korea Herald reported. Foreigners sold a net 2.2 trillion won that day alone. The 05:15 UTC level was about 8% below that close.

Crypto traders watch Seoul because South Korea is one of the largest retail crypto markets, and many Korean investors also hold the AI and chip trade. This time the link did not drag bitcoin lower. Policy in Seoul is moving too: the government is weighing a fourth delay of its crypto tax, as we reported in our piece on Korea’s 22% crypto tax.

The worry around AI went beyond Korea. Elice Group, a Korean AI infrastructure company, opened 16% below its offering price after raising 201.1 billion won, Reuters reported. The agency also cited Goldman Sachs estimates that five large AI cloud companies will lift their combined capital spending to about $1.2 trillion next year, which keeps their results this week in focus.

Elsewhere in Asia the falls were smaller. The Nikkei 225 was down about 0.6% in an investingLive wrap from about 03:38 UTC, 1.28% in the Reuters report and 1.55% at 05:20 UTC on Yahoo Finance: it slid as the session went on. The Hang Seng was 1.31% lower at 05:20 UTC, while Shanghai had recovered almost all of its early loss, down 0.09%. MSCI’s index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan was down 0.93%, according to Reuters, and Euro Stoxx 50 futures 0.71%.

China holds its rates and fixes the yuan at its strongest since early 2023

China’s banks left the loan prime rates unchanged for a 17th month, at 3.0% for one year and 3.5% for five years, investingLive reported. The People’s Bank of China set the dollar reference rate at 6.7200 yuan, against a Reuters estimate of 6.6813, its strongest fixing for the yuan since 2 February 2023, according to the same outlet.

The central bank also said it would run daily overnight reverse repurchase operations from 21 October to 2 November, for up to 1 trillion yuan a day, with the rate to be disclosed at the first operation on Wednesday, investingLive reported. Governor Pan Gongsheng had said on Monday, at the Financial Street Forum in Beijing, that the PBOC would study making the overnight rate its main policy rate.

Chinese stocks have had a long autumn. The CSI 300 fell 3.4% last week, its 10th weekly decline in a row and the longest such streak since the index started in 2005, Protos reported, citing the index provider’s data.

Tuesday’s agenda: a ZRO unlock, US housing data and SpaceX after the bell

The calendar for crypto is light. The main item is a LayerZero token unlock worth about $44 million, according to the CoinDesk calendar; Tokenomist values it at $43.54 million. Trackers disagree on its weight: CoinDesk and Tokenomist put it at 3.83% of supply, while DefiLlama counts 23.63 million tokens, or 5.92% of circulating supply. The exact hour was not confirmed at 05:30 UTC. Our LayerZero project page explains what the protocol does.

In the US, September housing starts and building permits come out at 12:30 UTC. Economists expect 1.30 million starts, after 1.275 million in August, and 1.40 million permits, after 1.394 million, according to CoinDesk’s week-ahead calendar. These figures rarely move bitcoin on their own.

The Federal Reserve is in its quiet period before the 27-28 October meeting, so no Fed speaker is scheduled. Reuters wrote that recent comments by Fed officials, including chair Kevin Warsh, point to no hurry to raise rates again.

Company results may matter more for risk appetite. RTX reports before the open at about 09:55 UTC and General Motors at about 10:30 UTC, Newsquawk lists, with GE Aerospace also due before the bell. SpaceX posts its third-quarter results after the US close, with a webcast at 20:30 UTC, the company said; analysts expect revenue of $12.98 billion, according to Newsquawk. Netflix publishes at about 20:01 UTC and holds a video interview at 20:45 UTC, based on the times it announced in September; the consensus revenue figure is $12.87 billion.

Oil is the other variable. Brent rose 0.21% to $109.78 a barrel in the Reuters report, as traders weighed a US executive order waiving some sanctions and tariffs on Russian energy; President Donald Trump had said on Saturday that he had not made a final decision.

Paris postpones the vote on the stablecoin swap tax

One date drops off the list. The French National Assembly will not hold its vote on the revenue part of the 2027 budget today as planned: parliament channel LCP reported on Monday that 2,828 of 3,396 amendments were still unexamined, and no new date has been set. The text still contains the amendment adopted 38 to 37 on 16 October that ends the tax deferral on swaps from crypto into stablecoins from 1 January 2027, the measure described in our report on the French stablecoin tax vote.

Deputies turn to the social security budget from today. Journal du Coin, citing Capital, says the debate on the revenue part should resume around 27 October. The deadline for the first reading of the state budget is 17 November, LCP noted.

What is still unknown on Tuesday morning

Several figures were missing at 05:30 UTC. No closing level was available for the Kospi, the Nikkei, the Hang Seng or Shanghai. No overnight liquidation total had been published in a form we could check. Monday’s closing moves of crypto-linked US shares were not available either.

Wednesday brings Meta’s results after the US close and UK inflation data, Friday the flash PMI surveys. The Fed decides on rates on 28 October.