Bitcoin rose 2.43% across the five US cash sessions of the week of 26 October and still finished the week 5.5% lower, by our calculation from Coinbase Exchange candles. From Friday 23 October at 20:00 UTC to Friday 30 October at 20:00 UTC it went from $81,184 to $76,733. Every dollar of that loss, and more, went in the hours when Wall Street was shut. The bitcoin price today, a Saturday with US markets closed, was about $77,620 around 17:39 UTC on Coindaro’s market snapshot.
So the question for this weekend is a narrow one: how much of crypto’s bad week came from Wall Street? Our answer is less than the Nasdaq chart suggests, with one large caveat. During Friday’s tech rout, with the Nasdaq Composite down 2.86%, bitcoin lost 0.5% inside the session. In the night the Binance hack began, it lost 4.49%. Yet holders of the products that trade on Wall Street did sell. US spot bitcoin ETFs lost about $643 million on Friday, and Coinbase shares fell about 11%.
That leaves a chart that looks steady and a set of investors who were not. Friday afternoon alone is in our analysis of the 30 October session, written before the close, and the fund-by-fund ETF figures are in Saturday morning’s report on the $643 million outflow. The full week, read session by session, gives a different answer from either day.
Bitcoin price today: five sessions up, four nights down
The table splits the week into the stretches when the New York Stock Exchange was open, 13:30 to 20:00 UTC while the US is on daylight time, and the stretches when it was not. The split is our own calculation from Coinbase Exchange’s public five-minute candles, recomputed on Saturday 31 October. Each 20:00 value is the open of the 20:00 candle, so the first transfers out of Binance at 20:05 UTC on Thursday, dated by TRM Labs, fall in the night and outside the session.
| Stretch (UTC) | BTC start | BTC end | BTC move | ETH move |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Weekend, Fri 23 20:00 to Mon 26 13:30 | $81,184 | $79,819 | -1.68% | -3.39% |
| Mon session | $79,819 | $79,878 | +0.07% | +0.17% |
| Mon night | $79,878 | $80,014 | +0.17% | +0.33% |
| Tue session | $80,014 | $80,707 | +0.87% | +0.96% |
| Tue night | $80,707 | $80,509 | -0.25% | -0.45% |
| Wed session | $80,509 | $81,502 | +1.23% | +1.53% |
| Wed night | $81,502 | $80,144 | -1.67% | -1.85% |
| Thu session | $80,144 | $80,743 | +0.75% | +0.34% |
| Thu night (Binance hack) | $80,743 | $77,119 | -4.49% | -4.65% |
| Fri session | $77,119 | $76,733 | -0.50% | +0.43% |
| Five sessions, chained | +2.43% | +3.48% | ||
| Four nights, chained | -6.15% | -6.52% | ||
| Full week, Fri 20:00 to Fri 20:00 | $81,184 | $76,733 | -5.48% | -6.55% |
Four of the five sessions were positive for bitcoin, and all five for ether. Ether’s gain through the cash hours was larger than bitcoin’s, which makes its 6.55% weekly loss the more lopsided of the two.
The nights tell the opposite story, though unevenly. Monday’s was slightly positive and Tuesday’s barely negative. Then Wednesday night took 1.67%, about what the previous weekend had taken, and Thursday night took 4.49%. That single stretch accounts for nearly three quarters of the 6.15% lost across the nights, by our calculation.
A 2.4% gain in cash hours describes a window, not a trend, and capturing it would have meant trading at every bell. Other windows give other weekly numbers as well. Coindaro’s market snapshot showed bitcoin down 2.76% over seven days around 17:39 UTC, a rolling window that starts last Saturday evening and includes today’s recovery. CryptoTicker had 3.73% at Saturday midday and TradingKey 4.45%. We use Friday to Friday because it is the only window that lines up with the stock market’s week.
Friday’s -0.50% also hides a rough session. Coinbase prices ran from $77,958 in the 15:15 UTC candle down to $76,141 in the 18:50 UTC candle, a swing of about 2.3% by our calculation, before recovering part of it. Bitcoin was not asleep while the Nasdaq fell. It simply ended close to where it began.
Against the Nasdaq on the same clock, four days out of five went the same way
The session table can flatter bitcoin, because it compares different things. Stocks are quoted close to close, so their daily change includes the overnight gap, whereas our session column leaves it out. Put bitcoin on the stock market’s own clock, 20:00 UTC to 20:00 UTC, and the picture changes.
| Day | Nasdaq Composite close | Nasdaq day | BTC, 20:00 to 20:00 UTC |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mon 26 | 26,169.38 | +0.82% | -1.61% |
| Tue 27 | 26,477.81 | +1.18% | +1.04% |
| Wed 28 | 26,549.85 | +0.27% | +0.99% |
| Thu 29 | about 26,184.73 | -1.38% | -0.93% |
| Fri 30 | 25,437.00 | -2.86% | -4.97% |
| Week | -2.00% | -5.48% |
Tuesday and Wednesday look like the ordinary link. Both rose, and Bitfinex Alpha put the 30-day correlation between bitcoin and the Nasdaq-100 at 0.74 on 28 October. Thursday still fits on direction. Friday fits as well, but the scale is wrong for a tech story: bitcoin fell nearly 5% on a clock that contains the hack, while the index fell less than 3%.
Monday is the outlier in the other direction, and a small one. Stocks rose while bitcoin was still marked down from its weekend.
Friday’s close itself was the worst of the week for stocks. Intel fell 28.58% to $65.76, its worst day since 1974 according to StockTitan, citing CNN, and Reddit fell 29.22% to $91.73, both on weak fourth-quarter guidance. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index lost 7.20%, per Capp Notes. The Nasdaq Composite closed 7.8% below its record close of 6 October, according to MarketScreener, which carried Reuters’ report. Reuters pointed to worries over the capital spending of the largest tech groups, and Capital Economics’ John Higgins said the boom is “partly dependent on external financing”.
| Index | Close, 30 Oct | Day | Week |
|---|---|---|---|
| S&P 500 | 7,580.07 | -1.82% | -0.57% |
| Dow Jones Industrial Average | 51,770.31 | -1.09% | -0.85% |
| Nasdaq Composite | 25,437.00 | -2.86% | -2.00% |
| Nasdaq-100 | 28,384.85 | -3.46% | not found |
| Russell 2000 | 2,811.84 | -1.66% | +1.29% |
The Dow and the S&P 500 finished the week with losses below 1%, and the small companies of the Russell 2000 finished it higher. The rout sat in one day and one part of the market. Daniela Hathorn of Capital.com, quoted by Yahoo, put it this way: “strong AI demand is no longer enough on its own”.
Leave out Thursday night and bitcoin’s week sits between the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq
Take the -5.48% week and strip out the Thursday night gap, and the remaining hours compound to about -1.0%, by our calculation. That sits between the S&P 500’s -0.57% and the Nasdaq Composite’s -2.00%. Across the other 150 hours or so, then, bitcoin’s net move looked like that of a risky US asset in a poor week for tech. This is arithmetic on the hours that remain. It does not say what bitcoin would have done with no hack, and it does not claim the hack caused the difference.
We think the hack is the larger cause of Thursday night’s fall, but the subtraction cannot show it, for three reasons. Intel and Reddit reported after Thursday’s close too, so the night holds both shocks; our 30 October analysis went through that overlap. Wednesday night’s 1.67%, which we left in, came after the Fed’s decision and after Alphabet and Microsoft reported, so it is not obviously free of Wall Street. And subtracting one window from a week says when the price moved, never why.
Our reading of Thursday night stays what it was: the Binance theft, whose scale and timeline we set out in our main report on the hack, is the likelier main weight. A week of data adds one thing. Friday’s session did not repair the damage from that night and added a small loss to it, and most of the week was already gone by the time the Nasdaq had its worst day.
Why the Nasdaq’s worst day passed through bitcoin so lightly
The usual explanation for a flat session after a bad night is that forced sellers have already gone. CoinDesk reported at 06:22 UTC on Friday that CoinGlass had counted $1.53 billion of liquidations in 24 hours, with longs at 83.8% of the total and Binance at 49.2%, and Bitcoin.com News gave $1.66 billion at 17:02 UTC. Both windows include the hack night.
Leverage was there to clear. Before the hack, Bitfinex Alpha reported futures open interest, the value of positions still running, at 676,761 BTC on 27 October, the highest since 24 September and 9.2% above its 12 October level, even though the price had fallen 4.3% over that stretch. Open-interest-weighted funding stood at 9.8% annualised at 07:55 UTC on 28 October, up from 7.3% three days earlier, with longs paying shorts. Only about $31 million was liquidated in the 24 hours before that report, so those positions had not yet been forced out.
The flush story has a hole. We found no open-interest or funding figure for Friday or Saturday. TradingKey mentioned rising futures open interest on 31 October without giving a number. So “the leverage is gone” is an inference from liquidation totals, not a measurement. If open interest is still near 670,000 BTC, the argument fails.
ETF holders were not flat: $202 million out on the week
Here the steady chart misleads most. Crypto.news, working from Farside Investors data, shows inflows of $110.3 million on Monday, $176.0 million on Tuesday, $137.3 million on Wednesday and $17.2 million on Thursday, or $440.8 million in four days. Friday’s $643.2 million outflow more than erased them, leaving the week at about -$202.4 million, after +$301.2 million the week before. It was the largest daily outflow since the $691.7 million of 25 June. On the same basis October ends near -$515.9 million.
Two details of that week matter for the reading. Thursday’s $17.2 million, from the last session before the theft, was already the smallest of the four. And nearly all the buying came through one door: IBIT took $410.6 million of the $440.8 million in the first four days, about 93% by our arithmetic, and kept $176.9 million for the week. Fidelity’s FBTC ended it about $166 million lower, and ARK’s ARKB took its whole weekly loss on Friday.
SoSoValue’s table, as carried by FinanceFeeds and TokenPost, puts Friday at -$643.33 million, with total net assets of $98.14 billion and cumulative net inflows of $56.98 billion. We could not open either provider’s own page; both blocked our request, so these figures come through outlets that name the provider. We also found no weekly total published by SoSoValue, so the $202.4 million above is a Farside-based sum and should stay labelled that way.
For scale, $643 million is about 0.66% of those $98.14 billion in assets, by our arithmetic. That is a meaningful day and hardly a stampede. CryptoTicker suggested month-end rebalancing as one explanation and noted that an outflow does not mean the same amount of bitcoin was sold on an exchange that day, since only authorised participants create and redeem fund shares. That is a reading, not data, but it is a useful warning against matching Friday’s flow to Friday’s price.
Ether funds lost more in dollars. Crypto.news credits Farside’s Ethereum table for Friday’s $155.7 million, but names no provider beside its other ether figures: net outflows in every session, $431.4 million for the week and about $1.61 billion for October. Those totals deserve more care than the bitcoin ones. Ether gained 3.48% in cash hours in a week when its US funds reported net outflows every day.
Crypto stocks took both shocks: Coinbase closed about 11% lower
Crypto-linked shares took the Nasdaq’s selloff and the hack at the same time. CoinDesk’s live blog showed closing tags of $143.21 for Coinbase, $130.49 for Strategy, $72.54 for Circle, $23.91 for Bullish and $15.98 for Galaxy. Those tags carry no date on the page, so we checked only the one we could: Coinbase closed at $160.59 on Thursday according to Yahoo Finance, which makes Friday about -10.8% by our arithmetic.
The same-session comparison, -0.5% against about -11%, overstates the gap, because the stock had a night to catch up on. On the stock’s own clock bitcoin lost 4.97%. Company news adds to the rest. Coinbase’s third-quarter profit was mostly a mark on its own crypto, and Strategy disclosed the departure of its CFO, both on Thursday. Cantor Fitzgerald and TD Cowen, in Friday notes reported by CoinDesk, treated the hack as Binance’s security failure and no repeat of 2022, which is sell-side opinion and not evidence of who bought. Inside US hours, then, the selling showed up in funds and shares more than in the coin itself.
Why gold and bitcoin fell together: higher for longer, then margin calls
Gold offered no shelter either. December futures settled at $3,898.90 on Friday, down 3.29% according to Yahoo. Kitco had spot near $3,880, off about 3.5% on the day and roughly 3% on the week, the lowest since 6 October 2025. Silver lost nearly 6% on Friday and nearly 9% on the week. So bitcoin, gold, silver and tech all ended the week lower, and each had its own proximate reason.
What they shared was a rates backdrop that hardened through the week. On Wednesday the Fed held at 3.75%-4.00%, with Lisa Cook and Beth Hammack dissenting in favour of a hike. On Thursday, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported third-quarter growth of 3.4% annualised against a 3.1% consensus and September PCE inflation at 3.6% over a year. Initial jobless claims came in at 194,000. WTI crude ended Friday at $104.12 and Brent at $113.43, per Capp Notes, with the war with Iran behind the rise, Kitco reported.
Peter Grant of Zaner Metals said, in a report carried by CNBC, that “the higher-for-longer theme prevails, and that’s weighing on precious metals”. Waleed Said of GivTrade told Kitco: “So in this war gold is not acting as the safe haven people expect.”
The odd part is Friday itself. Gold fell while the 10-year Treasury yield dropped about 6 basis points to 4.929% (Yahoo; Capp Notes had 4.94%, down 4), and the dollar index slipped 0.12% to 101.92 (Capp Notes). Both moves normally help gold. Said told Kitco that people sold gold to cover margin calls elsewhere when tech fell. Commerzbank analysts, in the CNBC report, said the tech drop may have led to forced selling and margin calls, and called the fall in precious metals exaggerated. On the day, that looks more like a scramble for cash than a rates move; over the week, rates remain the better explanation.
The odds of a December Fed hike, a rise in rates and not a cut, show the same split. They came close to 90% on Wednesday and had fallen to about 70% by 11:49 UTC on Friday, CoinDesk reported. Later figures run from about 72% to about 80%: Capp Notes gave 76% from CME FedWatch at the close and 71.5%-72% on Polymarket and Kalshi, while CryptoTicker, also citing FedWatch, put futures at around 80%. We did not open FedWatch ourselves, so we report a range and attribute it to those outlets. Either way, odds fell on the worst day for stocks, which suggests Friday’s selling did not come from fears of a tighter Fed.
For crypto, that argues against a macro explanation of the week’s biggest move. Rates may explain the pressure on gold. They do not explain a 4.49% fall between Thursday’s close and Friday’s open.
What would prove this reading wrong
Our reading is that Wall Street’s sessions did not drive crypto’s loss this week, that the hack did, with an unwinding of leverage we infer but cannot measure, and that ETF and share holders carried the selling inside US hours. One week, one hack and one cluster of earnings make a small sample, and hourly windows cannot separate causes. These outcomes would break it:
- Bitcoin falls below Friday’s $76,141 low and follows the Nasdaq lower on Monday and Tuesday while Binance’s withdrawal restart goes smoothly. The equity link would be back, and the hack would look secondary.
- ETF outflows above about $300 million a day persist for two or three sessions, in both Farside and SoSoValue data, with the Nasdaq steady. The selling would then be specific to crypto.
- Open interest proves to be still near 670,000 BTC with funding positive. Leverage would not have been cleared, and the calm of Friday would have a different explanation.
- A hotter October jobs report on 6 November pushes December hike odds back towards 90%, and bitcoin falls alongside gold and tech. That would point to rates as the main force.
- The Nasdaq recovers much of its 7.8% gap to the record and bitcoin does not follow. The hack’s overhang would then still be weighing, not fading.
- The stolen coins move or are sold and the price falls well beyond the Nasdaq. 24/7 Wall St. cites the Bybit theft, after which bitcoin was 12.1% lower a week later and 10.3% lower after 30 days.
The last two would strengthen the case that crypto-specific causes dominate, but they would undo the idea that the damage ended on Thursday night.
Next dates: Binance, flows and the jobs report
October ends tonight. From its $83,556 opening on Coinbase to $77,465 in the 17:40 UTC candle, bitcoin was down about 7.3% by our calculation; that candle comes from a different feed from the snapshot price above, so the two should not be compared to the dollar. Cointelegraph, citing CoinGlass, called it on Friday potentially the worst October since 2014, at about -7.7%. The Nasdaq’s October was about -5.3%, according to CryptoTicker.
Binance said on Saturday that it has replaced about 90% of the stolen assets, up from about 80% on Friday, and that withdrawals remain on track for Sunday 1 November once testing is passed, with no confirmed hour. Both statements are Binance’s word, not independently verified. Proof-of-reserves results are due by Monday, the day that also brings the ISM manufacturing survey, results from Apple and Palantir, and the CoinShares weekly report. CoinShares covers products worldwide, so its figures will not match the US tables above. Tuesday 3 November has the US midterm elections and AMD’s results. Bank of England rates follow on Thursday 5 November, the day Strategy’s CFO Andrew Kang leaves.
Friday 6 November is the date that matters most for this analysis. FactSet expects 55,000 new payrolls in October after 29,000 in September, according to CryptoTicker, at 13:30 UTC, or 08:30 in New York once US clocks change on Sunday. The Fed meets again on 8 and 9 December, and Fed Chair Kevin Warsh has said “The period right in front of us is information rich”.
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