Bitcoin breaks $80,000 on Washington’s Middle East moves, but the US has ordered one departure and ETFs cannot trade until Monday

The bitcoin price today fell through $80,000 at 14:18 UTC on Saturday 24 October, on Coinbase, and kept going to $79,107 at 15:25 UTC, its lowest level since 18 September. By 16:50 UTC it had climbed back to $80,105. The press tied the drop to US “evacuations” in the Middle East. On the record, Washington has ordered one departure, from Saudi Arabia on Wednesday, and trimmed staff at four other embassies that stay open, according to AP and Reuters. The US spot bitcoin ETFs that might have absorbed the selling are closed until Monday, and they ended Friday with a net outflow of $137.94 million, according to SoSoValue data.

That Friday figure corrects the first print. Our Saturday morning report on the late-Friday slide used a preliminary outflow of $27.6 million, published by Farside at 03:20 UTC when only Fidelity’s and Morgan Stanley’s funds had reported. The final number is about five times larger, and BlackRock accounts for most of it.

Below: Friday’s closing numbers, what the government said against what was reported, how derivatives traders took the move, and the US dates that now decide whether the low $80,000s hold. Friday’s intraday picture, with the Dow, Brent at $116 and the liquidation data, ran in our analysis of Friday’s US session.

Bitcoin price today: through $80,000 at 14:18 UTC on a thin Saturday

For six sessions bitcoin had stayed between about $80,400 and $84,900. The weekday drivers were all American: the Nasdaq, oil and the ETF tape. Saturday had none of them, and the floor gave way anyway.

The morning was quiet. Between 01:00 and 13:00 UTC, Coinbase’s BTC-USD market traded between 47 and 137 BTC an hour. Bitcoin sat near $80,600 until about 14:10 UTC and had slipped to $80,436 by 14:14. The real selling started at 14:15 UTC, which is 10:15 in New York, and the first minute under $80,000 came at 14:18 UTC. That minute alone traded 147 BTC, the largest of the session, with a low of $79,917.

Source: Coinbase Exchange public hourly candles, BTC-USD, read between 16:37 and 16:59 UTC. The 16:00 UTC hour was still open.

The 14:00 UTC hour traded almost eight times the volume of the hour before it. Bitcoin bounced to about $80,300 between 14:35 and 14:38 UTC, then a second leg began between 15:10 and 15:16 UTC, with 45 and 58 BTC changing hands in single minutes. The low of $79,107 printed at 15:25 UTC. From the 14:00 UTC open of $80,593, that is a fall of 1.84%; from Friday’s UTC close of $81,078, it is 2.43%. Over the whole of 14:00 to 16:00 UTC, about 1,209 BTC traded on Coinbase.

The rebound came late. Coinbase’s ticker showed $79,568 at 16:37 UTC, then $80,105 at 16:50:58 UTC and $80,102 at 16:59:02 UTC; Deribit’s bitcoin index read $80,103 at the same minute. One recovered print is not a recovered level: the daily close at 00:00 UTC is the next test.

The $79,107 low sits below the $79,676 of Thursday 15 October, when bitcoin briefly lost $80,000 and won it back within hours. On Coinbase’s daily candles, no day has had a lower low since 18 September. CoinDesk put it more simply in its 15:11 UTC report: “Bitcoin has sunk to its weakest level in more than one month.” Over the week, bitcoin is down 2.32%, from Monday’s $82,007 open to the 16:50 UTC print. Coindaro’s market snapshot at 16:55 UTC had it 2.30% lower over 24 hours, with ether down 4.36%, Solana 4.57% and XRP 3.18%. The Fear and Greed index stayed at 51, neutral, so the mood gauge had not caught up with the price.

What started the selling at 14:15 UTC is not known

Here the timeline matters. CoinDesk’s story linking the drop to US “evacuations” went up at 15:11 UTC, 53 minutes after bitcoin first traded under $80,000. AP’s story on the embassy staff cuts had been out since late Friday evening in New York, around 01:42 UTC on Saturday. The Wall Street Journal report that CoinDesk cites came out on Saturday, but we could not establish at what time. So we cannot say that one headline caused the 14:15 UTC break. A thin weekend market, a known geopolitical worry and a round number gave way together; which came first is open.

The total of positions liquidated over the weekend is also unknown. CoinGlass pages did not load for us, and the only figure in circulation, an exchange blog headline from Phemex saying more than $200 million of long positions were wiped out, named no source. The exchange data below gives a partial picture instead.

What Washington announced, and what it did not

The word “evacuations” comes from the press, not from the US government. Here is what is on the record, in date order, with who said it.

On Wednesday 21 October the State Department put the US mission in Saudi Arabia on “ordered departure”: non-emergency staff and family members had to leave. Spokesperson Tommy Pigott said Iran-backed Houthis had stepped up attacks on the kingdom, and added: “The safety and security of Department personnel and their families remain our highest priority,” according to Al Jazeera and Reuters. He called an earlier media report of departures across the Gulf inaccurate. Four US officials, unnamed, told Reuters that missions in other Gulf states would also order family members out. The Houthis had carried out deadly strikes in the kingdom, including on Riyadh’s airport.

The same evening, at 20:50 UTC, NBC News reported that US troops and diplomats were leaving several Middle East posts. Its sources were two US officials and two people familiar with the matter, all unnamed, and the NBC report gave no numbers. No Pentagon statement confirming base pullbacks has been found since.

Late on Friday, AP’s Matthew Lee reported that the State Department is reducing staff at the US embassies in Jordan, Lebanon, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. All four were already on restricted operations and stay open. Unlike in Saudi Arabia, staff there are not required to leave. The department’s public reason was the Houthi threat. It did not mention Iran.

Iran came in through a memo. Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton wrote to Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Friday that Iran had “substantially increased efforts to target U.S. personnel”, AP reported after obtaining it; Axios had it first. Per AP, the memo says lethal Iranian plotting against Americans has reached advanced stages in the Middle East and some other countries. No targets, plots or evidence have been made public. US officials strongly deny that the drawdowns are linked to possible new US or Israeli strikes on Iran, AP said, while three officials, speaking anonymously, said the Iranian and Houthi threats are related to the changes.

Two remarks fed the market’s reading. At a Florida rally on Friday, President Trump said “We may do another little ‘Epic Fury,'” the name of the earlier US operation against Iran, according to CoinDesk, which reports that he has threatened to resume the conflict after the 3 November midterm elections. Then on Saturday the Wall Street Journal, as cited by CoinDesk, reported that the US is quickly pulling personnel out of embassies and bases across the region on intelligence that Iran is preparing attacks. We could not read the Journal’s text. Bloomberg ran a headline the same day saying Iranian plots and Houthi attacks spurred the departure orders; its article was not readable either.

The verified tally is short: one ordered departure, four embassies with fewer staff and open doors, and an intelligence memo with no public detail. The troop movements rest on anonymous sources. Nobody has said how many people are involved, which bases, over what dates, or whether private Americans are being told to leave. No State Department statement dated Saturday was found, and the department’s website could not be read. AP describes the war as at a stalemate, with mediators trying to restart US-Iran talks; Iranian state television said this week that the Revolutionary Guard navy would strike US bases if US forces keep guiding ships through Hormuz.

Friday’s final numbers: a $137.94 million ETF outflow, not $27.6 million

US spot bitcoin ETFs count their flows after the US close, which is why the first numbers on Saturday morning were partial. SoSoValue’s final Friday tally, as reported by Bloomingbit and CoinCentral, is a net outflow of $137.94 million. BlackRock’s IBIT lost $110.34 million and Fidelity’s FBTC $31.78 million. Morgan Stanley’s MSBT took in $4.19 million. Grayscale’s GBTC and Mini BTC, Bitwise’s BITB and ARK’s ARKB had no flow. Cumulative net inflows since the January 2024 launch stand at about $57.18 billion. Farside’s and SoSoValue’s own pages did not load for us, so this figure comes from two outlets citing SoSoValue.

Source: SoSoValue daily data (TFTC mirror to 22 October; Bloomingbit for 23 October). The weekly total is our sum of the daily rows. CoinCentral quotes a different multi-day figure that does not match its own daily numbers, so we use the rows.

The week still ends in the black, by about $305 million. The problem is the shape. The last two sessions took out $773.4 million, and Thursday’s outflow was the largest since 25 June, according to CryptoSlate. Starting from Cointelegraph’s SoSoValue count of about -$67 million for October after Tuesday, the month now stands near -$312 million and the year to date near +$564 million, by our arithmetic on rounded figures. If you are new to these funds, our glossary entry on crypto ETFs explains how creations and redemptions move bitcoin in and out of them.

Those outflows also have a price attached. Glassnode puts the average acquisition price of US spot ETF holders at about $81,500, as reported by CryptoSlate with data to 19 October. At Saturday’s low, bitcoin was $2,393 below it; at 16:50 UTC, about $1,395 below. A fund holder who bought at the average is now sitting on a small loss, and ETF shares cannot be sold until 13:30 UTC on Monday. What those holders do at the open is the first real test of the weekend move.

Wall Street’s Friday close was weak but not a rout. The Dow lost 1.2%, the S&P 500 0.5% and the Nasdaq 0.2%, according to The Street’s end-of-day report. Over the week the Dow gained 0.4% while the Nasdaq lost 0.7% and the Philadelphia semiconductor index 3.2%, its third weekly fall. WTI rose about 4% to above $103, Brent closed above $116 and the VIX was 19.4. The Street tied oil to fears of renewed US-Iran hostilities after the midterms. Kristina Hooper of Man Group told Reuters on Friday: “There is still fallout from the questioning of the AI trade.”

For the Fed, CME FedWatch priced a 91% chance of no change on 28 October at Friday’s close, with a 78% chance of a hike by December, The Street reported. Prediction markets moved slightly further on Saturday: Kalshi and Polymarket together gave about 94% to a hold at 14:58 UTC, according to DeFiRate, with December hike odds in the mid-70s. Those are bets, not futures prices, and the two should not be confused.

Options and leverage: open interest rose into the drop

A liquidation cascade has a signature: open interest, the value of open futures positions, falls fast as positions are closed by force. Saturday did not look like that. Coindaro read the public data of the main exchanges between 16:38 and 16:51 UTC, and most of it points to traders opening positions as the price fell, not being thrown out. Our glossary entry on liquidations explains how the forced closing works.

On Binance’s USDT-margined bitcoin perpetual, open interest was 94,390 BTC at 13:00 UTC, just before the drop, and 95,146 BTC at 16:00 UTC, about $7.59 billion. That is an increase of roughly 756 BTC, or 0.8%. On Bybit it rose from 64,058 to 65,025 BTC over the same hours, up 1.5%. Open interest alone does not say who opened what. A mix of new shorts and dip-buying longs is the likely reading, not a certainty. For contrast, Friday’s late slide had cut Binance open interest by about 3%, from 94,901 BTC at 11:00 UTC to 91,962 BTC at 18:00 UTC; that leverage was rebuilt before Saturday’s fall.

Funding, the fee that holders of perpetual futures pay each other every eight hours, tells a calmer story. On Binance it was 0.01% at 16:00 UTC on Friday, the standard level that means longs pay a small premium. It then fell at each settlement: 0.00394% at 00:00 UTC, 0.00343% at 08:00 UTC and 0.00096% at 16:00 UTC on Saturday, about 1% a year. The running estimate for the next window was a hair below zero at 16:51 UTC. Longs no longer pay to hold their bets, but shorts are not paying heavily either. That is a market without a crowded side, which is not the same as a safe one.

Retail positioning has barely moved. Binance’s global long/short account ratio was 2.23 at 16:00 UTC, meaning about 69% of accounts were net long, against 2.19 at 10:00 UTC. A sample of OKX’s public liquidation feed, its last 100 bitcoin blockchain, where users swap tokens directly from their own wallets without handing custody of their funds to a company.">swap liquidations between 15:19 and 16:16 UTC, showed 595 contracts of longs closed against 193 of shorts, about three to one. It is a sample, not a total.

The 30 October expiry is the big one

On Deribit, the largest crypto options venue, bitcoin options open interest at 16:38 UTC was 242,600 BTC in calls and 145,452 BTC in puts, a put/call ratio of 0.60. The expiry of Friday 30 October at 08:00 UTC holds 87,653 calls and 48,764 puts. No expiry in the next four weeks comes close: 6 November has 8,592 calls and 3,967 puts. The biggest call strikes for 30 October are far above the market, at $95,000 (19,948 contracts), $100,000 and $90,000. The largest put strikes are at $70,000 and $75,000. At $80,000, puts slightly outnumber calls, 1,651 against 1,365.

Most of that call open interest will expire worthless if bitcoin stays near $80,000. By Coindaro’s own calculation on the open interest at 16:38 UTC, the “max pain” level for the expiry, where option buyers as a group lose the most, is $78,000. It is an indicator, not a forecast.

Implied volatility rose. Deribit’s DVOL index, which measures the 30-day volatility priced into bitcoin options, moved between 37.0 and 37.8 all of Friday, was 38.68 at 14:00 UTC on Saturday, 39.55 at 15:00 UTC and 39.27 at 16:00 UTC. The $80,000 strike for 30 October traded at about 34.8% implied volatility. A two-point rise is a repricing, not a panic.

Ether falls under $2,300 after a month of ETF outflows

Ether took the larger hit. On Coinbase it first traded under $2,300 at 15:16 UTC and reached $2,275.94 at 15:19 UTC, its lowest level since about 20 August. The 15:00 UTC hour traded 19,560 ETH, the largest hourly volume in the 350 hours of data we read. Ether was back at $2,312.77 at 16:50 UTC, down 3.94% from Monday’s open of $2,407.5. The ETH/BTC ratio was 0.0289 at that time. The Defiant reported that ether has lost 14.7% over 28 days and trails bitcoin by 9.15 percentage points over matching windows.

The ETF side explains part of it. US spot ether ETFs lost about $111 million on Thursday, $75 million of it from BlackRock’s ETHA, according to SoSoValue figures cited by CryptoSlate and ChainCatcher. Friday brought a small net inflow of $4.35 million, according to SoSoValue data reported by Bloomingbit: Fidelity’s FETH took $3.58 million and Morgan Stanley’s MSSE $0.77 million. Wednesday had also closed slightly positive, at $14.9 million, TokenPost reported. Cointelegraph, citing SoSoValue, counted $1.08 billion of October outflows after 21 October, the largest monthly outflow since November 2025, which erased September’s $832 million inflow. Adding Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, October is near -$1.18 billion, the same figure CryptoSlate gives. CryptoSlate puts the year-to-date total at about +$387 million. We looked at why the ether funds lose more than the bitcoin ones in our 17 October analysis of ether ETF outflows; nothing this week changes that reading.

The US week ahead: the Fed, Big Tech, GDP and an options expiry

Almost every date that matters for crypto next week is American. US clocks still run four hours behind UTC until 1 November, then five.

Sources: Federal Reserve FOMC calendar, StockTitan and OpeningBell earnings calendars, Microsoft investor relations, company announcements. Alphabet’s and Amazon’s release times have not been announced, only their call times.

The Fed meeting has no new economic projections this time, according to the Fed’s calendar, so the statement and Warsh’s words carry the signal. A hold is priced; the December question is not settled. Wednesday evening then brings Alphabet and Microsoft, each worth about $3.9 trillion according to OpeningBell, and Amazon follows on Thursday. Reuters noted that about a third of S&P 500 companies report next week and that the hyperscalers’ capital spending is the number to watch. Those results will test how closely bitcoin still trades with the AI stocks.

Two crypto companies report on Thursday evening. Coinbase publishes its third-quarter results after the close, and Strategy, the largest corporate holder of bitcoin, holds a webinar at 21:00 UTC. Glassnode puts the average cost of corporate treasuries at about $80,200, according to CryptoSlate, which bitcoin crossed in both directions on Saturday.

What would change the picture from here

The levels in play come from named sources, not from us. Glassnode’s “True Market Mean”, reported by CryptoSlate, is about $77,600 and is the next reference below if bitcoin closes under $80,000. Our max-pain figure for 30 October sits nearby at $78,000, and the large put strikes start at $75,000. CoinCentral notes that the $79,658 to $80,000 area has been defended several times this month. Above, the ETF average cost at $81,500 and Wednesday’s $84,856 high are the marks; October’s high on Coinbase is $87,249. Glassnode data reported by CoinCentral also shows that profit-taking runs at about half the September pace and that selling by one-to-two-year holders is under a third of its early-October peak: the older coins are not the ones moving.

Several things would change this reading, in either direction:

• Monday’s ETF flows. A third day of outflows above $100 million would bring the three-day total near $900 million; inflows above $200 million with bitcoin under $81,500 would show buyers taking the dip.
• A daily close under $79,000, then under $78,000, at 00:00 UTC. Those are the closes that would put the $77,600 reference in play.
• A real announcement. A State Department or Pentagon statement confirming wider departures, a strike, or a restart of US-Iran talks would replace the anonymous reports with facts.
• Oil when futures reopen on Sunday evening, New York time, after Brent’s close above $116.
• The Fed’s words on December on Wednesday, then the capital spending numbers of Alphabet, Microsoft and Amazon.
• The 30 October expiry, when most of the far out-of-the-money calls fall away.

None of this is a forecast, and none of it is advice. The data points the other way from a capitulation for now: funding flat, volatility up two points, open interest higher and older holders quiet. A market that added leverage on the way down has one more leg to fall through if $79,000 gives way. The first answer comes at 13:30 UTC on Monday, when the ETFs open.