Bitcoin Stalls in the $80,000s a Year After the 10/10 Crash

Bitcoin stalls in the low $80,000s as the 10/10 anniversary passes

Bitcoin spent the week of October 13 grinding lower, and by the weekend of October 17 to 18 it was changing hands near $81,500, down from roughly $86,000 at the start of the month and more than 30% below the record high of just over $126,000 it set on October 6, 2025. This was not a crash. It was something arguably more revealing for a market that spent most of last year treating six figures as a floor: a slow fade on thin conviction, with every bounce running into sellers and every dip bought just enough to stop a rout.

The calendar is doing a lot of the talking. The week fell exactly one year after the 10/10 crash of October 10, 2025, the largest liquidation event in the history of crypto, and the memory of that day sits behind every chart traders are looking at. It also arrived three days after a hotter inflation report that pushed markets to price in a Federal Reserve that may not be finished raising rates, and less than two weeks before a policy meeting that will shape the tone into year end. For a price-action read, the honest framing is that the level on the screen matters less than the three forces tugging at it: the hangover from last October, a hawkish macro surprise, and a persistent drip of money leaving the spot exchange-traded funds.

This piece walks through all three, then turns to what on-chain cost bases, derivatives positioning, sentiment gauges, and Wall Street’s own, repeatedly lowered, targets say about where support and resistance actually sit heading into the October 28 Federal Reserve decision.

The week in numbers

Before the narrative, here is the tape. The figures below come from spot and derivatives data and on-chain cost-basis models as of the weekend of October 17 to 18, 2026, and each links to its source.

One year after 10/10, the crash that still writes the rules

To understand why a quiet slide into the low $80,000s has rattled so many desks, rewind twelve months. On Friday, October 10, 2025, President Donald Trump announced a 100% tariff on Chinese imports, and the leveraged crypto market detonated. More than $19 billion in positions were liquidated in a single day, the largest derivatives wipeout the market has ever recorded, according to CoinShares. Bitcoin fell from a Friday high of $122,574 to as low as $104,782, a drop of more than 14%, while Ether lost around 12% and several wrapped assets briefly depegged as the cascade fed on itself.

The mechanics were brutal. Liquidations hit more than 1.6 million accounts, and long positions (traders betting on higher prices) made up roughly $16 billion to $17 billion of the damage. About 70% of it, close to $6.93 billion, landed in a 40-minute window, and $3.21 billion was wiped out in a single minute at 21:15 UTC, per exchange data compiled after the event.

A year later, the scar tissue is still visible. Bloomberg reported that market depth and liquidity never fully rebuilt after the sell-off, and that investors have since kept a wide berth from leverage. CoinDesk found that Bitcoin and Ether order-book liquidity has largely recovered, but that smaller altcoins remain fragile. The anniversary coverage has a nervous edge: CCN ran a piece asking directly whether the warning signs are appearing again. They are not, at least not in the one place that caused the damage last time, as the derivatives section below explains. But the psychology lingers, and it is part of why this market sells first and asks questions later whenever a macro headline turns sour.

There is a more constructive way to read the same anniversary. One retrospective argued that a year of forced deleveraging has left Bitcoin’s leverage unusually clean, with the speculative froth that fueled the cascade now concentrated in altcoins rather than in Bitcoin itself. History also counsels patience: past cycles show that reclaiming a broken record high usually takes many months, not weeks, so a grind beneath the old high is closer to the historical norm than to a sign of structural failure. That is the tension defining the current tape: a market that is calmer under the hood than it looks on the screen.

The hot CPI that changed the math

The macro headline that turned sour arrived on October 14, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that consumer prices rose 3.7% in the year through September, up from 3.4% in August and a tenth of a point above forecasts, according to CNBC. Prices climbed 0.6% on the month, and core inflation, which strips out food and energy, ticked up to 2.6%. The main culprit was energy: gasoline jumped 9.1% in September and was up 34.2% from a year earlier, accounting for more than half of the monthly increase in the all-items index, CBS News reported.

Inflation reaccelerating matters to Bitcoin through a simple chain of logic. Hotter prices mean the Federal Reserve has less room to cut, which keeps real yields elevated and the dollar firm, and both of those are headwinds for an asset that pays no coupon and trades on liquidity and risk appetite. The September print was also, as CNN noted, the last clean snapshot of consumer prices before the November 3 midterm elections, which raises the political temperature around every subsequent data point. For a market already jumpy about leverage, an upside surprise on inflation was exactly the wrong kind of catalyst.

A Fed that already hiked, and might again

This is the part that separates the autumn of 2026 from the easy-money backdrop crypto enjoyed for much of the prior cycle. At its September 15 to 16 meeting, the Federal Open Market Committee voted to raise the target range by a quarter point to 3.75% to 4.00%, its first hike since 2023, a move aimed at containing a fresh inflation flare-up. Interest-rate futures tracked by Investing.com now put the odds of the range holding steady at the October 28 meeting at around 84%, with roughly a 16% chance of a second straight increase. Those odds had drifted lower through the month, briefly slipping below one in five after the early-October risk-off wave, before the hot September inflation print nudged them back up and put a December move firmly back in play.

The wildcard is the chair. Kevin Warsh, who now leads the Federal Reserve, has pointedly refused to telegraph his next move. Speaking on October 16, he said the economy had largely performed as expected since the September hike, but declined to commit either way, telling reporters, “I don’t prejudge meetings. I don’t believe in saying now what I might do at the meetings that we have in the balance of this year,” per CNBC. Axios characterized his tone as signaling a steady outlook while leaving the door to another hike open, and Warsh added a warning that the economy’s adjustment to artificial intelligence could be “very bumpy.”

The fiscal side is at least orderly. A September stopgap funded the federal government through December 11, averting an October 1 shutdown, which means the economic data the Fed relies on has kept flowing, Government Executive reported. For crypto traders, the practical upshot is a tightly packed calendar of binary events, a dynamic we mapped in our rundown of Washington’s next 90 days: the October 28 decision, the midterms, and a December meeting that is still very much live.

ETF flows turned into a drip of exits

If the macro set the mood, the spot ETFs set the marginal price, and in October they have mostly been selling. The month opened with a jolt: on October 7 and 8, US spot Bitcoin ETFs saw a net withdrawal of about $484.9 million, the largest single-day outflow since June, as a broad risk-off move hit stocks and gold alongside crypto. The bleeding was uneven after that, but the bias stayed negative.

The pattern, one heavy outflow day, a half-hearted bounce, then more selling, is the ETF version of the spot tape. On October 12, every dollar of the day’s $65.4 million net outflow came out of BlackRock’s IBIT, according to Crypto Briefing; by October 16 the complex shed another $82.4 million, led again by IBIT, per flow data; and on October 17 IBIT and its Ether counterpart ETHA led around $152 million in combined outflows, CryptoTimes reported.

Zoom out, though, and the franchise is still enormous. Cumulative net inflows into US spot Bitcoin ETFs stand near $56.9 billion, and the funds hold roughly $104 billion in assets, equal to about 6.35% of Bitcoin’s entire market value, according to flow trackers. That scale is a double-edged sword. It is a deep, regulated bid that did not exist in prior cycles, but it also concentrates a huge share of float in a handful of custodians and issuers, a structural concentration risk the market is only beginning to price. The level where those funds are, on average, break-even turns out to be the single most important line on the chart right now.

The flows also reflect something bigger than crypto. The early-October drawdown hit stocks and gold at the same time, with rising oil prices and Treasury yields pressuring risk assets across the board, which is why the ETF selling and the spot slide moved in lockstep rather than one leading the other. When Bitcoin trades as a high-beta macro asset, as it has this month, ETF flows become a transmission belt for broader risk sentiment, amplifying both the sell-offs and the relief bounces.

What on-chain cost bases say about support

Price-action analysis that stops at the chart misses the most useful question in a market like this: at what level does a large cohort of holders sit on a loss or a gain, and therefore become likely to sell or to hold? On-chain cost-basis models answer exactly that, and the analytics firm Glassnode laid out the full stack in its mid-October research note, titled “Boxed In.”

Start from the bottom. The realized price, the average acquisition cost of every coin that has moved on-chain, sits near $53,714, far below spot and not a level anyone expects to see tested absent a catastrophe. More relevant is the True Market Mean, the average cost basis of active investors, around $78,000; Bitcoin has held above that line since September 18, a stretch Glassnode shades as a bullish regime. Above that is the short-term holder cost basis near $73,300, the break-even for coins bought in roughly the last six months, which rose from about $72,800 in late September, according to on-chain data.

The level doing the most work right now is the US spot ETF cost basis, the average price the ETFs themselves paid for their coins, which sits almost exactly where Bitcoin is trading, around $81,500. Price slipped below it on October 8 and again on October 13 but closed back above both times, and every daily close since September 21 has held the line. That makes the low $80,000s a genuine pivot: the marginal institutional buyer of this cycle is, collectively, roughly break-even, so a decisive break lower would put that whole cohort underwater and risk turning patient holders into sellers. On the top side, Glassnode flags about $88,000 as the first real ceiling, because that is where the six to twelve month cost-basis band sits, and where trapped buyers can finally exit at break-even.

The practical takeaway from the cost-basis stack is a map of where selling pressure eases and where it intensifies. As long as daily closes hold above roughly $81,500, the average ETF buyer is not underwater and has little reason to capitulate, which is why dips have been shallow and quickly bought. Lose that level on a sustained basis and the next natural magnet is the $78,000 True Market Mean, then the $73,300 short-term holder cost basis, the point at which the typical buyer from the last six months moves into a loss and the risk of reflexive selling climbs. Those three numbers, not any trendline, are the real support structure here.

Derivatives look calmer than they did a year ago

Here is the reassuring part, and the clearest contrast with the setup that produced the 10/10 disaster. The leverage simply is not there this time. Aggregate Bitcoin open interest sits near $51.9 billion, down about 6% on the week and equal to only around 1.16% of market cap, according to derivatives data. Funding rates, the periodic payment between longs and shorts on perpetual futures, have turned slightly negative, with Binance’s Bitcoin funding rate around -0.0073%, meaning shorts are paying longs and the speculative tilt is, if anything, bearish, per market data.

The year-over-year comparison is stark. In the run-up to the October 2025 crash, annualized Bitcoin funding exceeded 8% on 18 of 32 exchange-days, a sign of rampant long leverage; in the comparable window this year it crossed that threshold only once and turned negative three times, CCN noted. The market’s leverage ratio has fallen for a fourth straight month to its lowest since August 2024, which one analysis summed up bluntly: a year after the crash, Bitcoin’s leverage is clean. The practical implication matters for anyone reading the tape. Downside from here would most likely be spot-driven, a slow grind as ETFs and holders sell, rather than the violent, self-reinforcing liquidation cascade that defined last October.

That distinction changes how to read every down day. In a leverage-driven market, a single headline can trigger liquidations that feed on themselves and overshoot wildly, the dynamic that turned a tariff announcement into a $19 billion wipeout last year. In a spot-driven market, declines tend to be slower, shallower and more orderly, because they depend on real holders choosing to sell rather than on forced margin calls. Less dramatic, and far less dangerous, it is the kind of backdrop in which a durable bottom can form.

Sentiment is neutral, not euphoric

Positioning and psychology line up with the clean-leverage story. The Crypto Fear and Greed Index read 45, squarely Neutral, on October 17, after bouncing between 56 and 64 earlier in the month and sitting well off its 2026 peak of 82 set on August 26, according to CFGI data. The seven-day average is around 60 and the thirty-day average near 67, the profile of a market that has cooled from greed without tipping into outright fear. Earlier in October that same gauge had already begun sliding as prices slipped.

Retail, meanwhile, has largely checked out. CryptoTimes noted that Google search interest in Bitcoin has fallen to a multi-year low even as price hovers near $81,000, a classic sign of disengagement rather than panic. Options traders, for their part, are bracing for the next catalyst: roughly $12.2 billion of Bitcoin options are set to expire on October 30, two days after the Fed decision, with max-pain dynamics likely to tug price toward the event. None of this is the stuff of a blow-off top. It looks more like the long, boring base that tends to form while a market waits for a macro verdict.

Wall Street keeps marking down its targets

The sell-side has spent 2026 walking backward. The clearest snapshot came in early October, when Citi, Standard Chartered and Bernstein all cut their Bitcoin targets in the same week. Citi now sees $113,000, though that is a twelve-month projection stretching to October 2027, after a year that took its number from $143,000 to $112,000 and briefly down to $82,000 in July. Standard Chartered’s Geoff Kendrick, long one of the most bullish voices on the Street, cut his year-end target from $150,000 to $100,000 back in February and has held there. Bernstein trimmed its year-end call from $150,000 to $125,000 on October 5 while reaffirming a long-term view of $1 million by 2033, per its latest note.

The holdouts are instructive. JPMorgan still pegs fair value at $150,000 to $170,000, and Tom Lee of Fundstrat continues to argue for $200,000 to $250,000, leaning on his thesis that the old four-year halving cycle is dead and that institutional and treasury demand have changed the math. Galaxy Digital’s Alex Thorn carries a $250,000 figure but has flagged it as highly uncertain and pushed the timeframe toward 2027. Taken together, published 2026 forecasts now span an enormous range, from the high $30,000s to $250,000, which is really a way of saying the professionals disagree about almost everything except that the next move depends on the Fed. We laid out why that single variable has come to dominate in our piece on how the 2026 price targets now ride on December.

The bears have their own numbers. The same survey of forecasts that tops out at $250,000 has a floor in the high $30,000s, and some strategists have flagged a slide toward $60,000 as the level that would confirm a deeper bear phase rather than a pullback. The gap between those outcomes is almost entirely a function of liquidity: whether the Fed is cutting or holding by early 2027, and whether the ETF bid returns or keeps leaking. For a market trading near $81,500, that is an uncomfortably wide cone of outcomes, and it explains why conviction, and volume, have drained out of the tape.

Miners, hashrate, and the floor under the price

Underneath the trading sits a physical industry whose economics quietly define a soft floor for the price. Bitcoin’s network hashrate, the total computing power securing the chain, is hovering near record highs, which is a vote of confidence in the network but also a squeeze on margins when price slips into the low $80,000s. Each new machine added raises the difficulty of mining and lowers the revenue per unit of hashing, so a flat price and a rising hashrate together compress the spread between what it costs to mine a coin and what that coin is worth.

When price approaches the marginal cost of production, which for older, less efficient rigs is uncomfortably close to current levels, weaker miners tend to curtail or sell inventory, adding supply precisely when the market is already soft. That selling is one more reason the low $80,000s are being defended and contested rather than cleanly reclaimed. The flip side is that miners have become far more sophisticated about hedging that exposure, turning hashrate and the forward price of mining into instruments they can trade, a financialization we unpacked in our report on how Bitcoin hashrate became an asset class. The maturing of that market is part of why miner stress has not translated into the kind of forced, disorderly selling seen in earlier downturns.

The regulatory and fiscal backdrop

Regulation, so often the dominant swing factor for crypto, has receded into the background this autumn, which is itself a kind of signal. The Securities and Exchange Commission has spent 2026 pivoting away from enforcement by lawsuit toward rulemaking, a shift that has removed a persistent overhang from the market even as macro stepped in to replace it as the main driver. We traced that transition in detail in our analysis of how the SEC’s rulebook is replacing the lawsuit.

The near-term catalysts are macro and political rather than legal: the October 28 Fed decision, the November 3 midterms, the October 30 options expiry, and the December 11 funding deadline that will test Washington’s appetite for another shutdown fight. For holders, the quieter regulatory backdrop has also renewed an old debate about where to keep coins. After two Octobers in a row defined by exchange and leverage blowups, more investors are revisiting self-custody, and our hardware wallet reviews walk through the trade-offs for anyone thinking about pulling funds off exchanges and trading venues.

Levels and scenarios into the October 28 Fed decision

Pulling the threads together gives a fairly clear map. On the downside, the first shelf is the True Market Mean near $78,000, followed by the short-term holder cost basis around $73,300; a weekly close below that lower level would mark the average recent buyer as underwater and would be the clearest technical signal yet that the trend has turned. The pivot is the low $80,000s, where the ETF cost basis and spot price are essentially on top of each other. On the upside, $84,000 is the near-term hurdle, and about $88,000 is the line that, once reclaimed on a closing basis, would clear the band of trapped buyers and open room toward the $90,000 to $98,000 zone that some analysts still see as achievable into November, a scenario laid out as Fed-hike odds slipped.

The binary nature of the setup is the point. A dovish hold on October 28, paired with ETF flows flipping back to inflows, would let the clean-leverage, neutral-sentiment base resolve higher. A hawkish surprise, a second hike or a signal that December is coming, would most likely send price to test $78,000 and then $73,000, slowly, given how little leverage is left to flush. Here is the near-term event map traders are watching:

• October 28: the FOMC decision; a hold is about 84% priced, so a hike or a hawkish hold is the risk.
• October 30: roughly $12.2 billion in Bitcoin options expire, two days after the Fed.
• November 3: US midterm elections, the first political read on an inflation-weary electorate.
• December 11: the federal funding deadline and a potential shutdown fight.
• December FOMC: still live for another policy move and fresh projections.

The bottom line for readers

Bitcoin’s price action in the middle of October 2026 is, more than anything, a macro story wearing a crypto costume. The asset is stuck in the low $80,000s not because anything broke on-chain, but because inflation reaccelerated, the Fed turned hawkish, and the marginal ETF dollar started leaving. The encouraging news, if you are constructive, is that the market is structurally healthier than it was a year ago: leverage is clean, sentiment is neutral rather than euphoric, and a thick stack of cost bases between $73,000 and $81,500 is providing real support. The sobering news is that none of that will matter much until the Fed shows its hand. Until then, expect a range, expect noise around each data release, and expect the low $80,000s to keep acting as the line both sides are fighting over.

Nothing here is investment advice. Prices, flows and forecasts cited were accurate as of the weekend of October 17 to 18, 2026, and every figure links to its source; markets move fast, so verify before acting.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is Bitcoin falling in October 2026?

Bitcoin has slid into the low $80,000s mainly because of macro pressure, not a crypto-specific failure. A hotter-than-expected September inflation report (3.7%) released on October 14 pushed markets to expect fewer rate cuts, the Federal Reserve raised rates in September and may hike again, and US spot Bitcoin ETFs have seen net outflows for much of the month. Together those forces have drained risk appetite and left Bitcoin more than 30% below its record high.

What was the 10/10 crash and why does it still matter?

The 10/10 crash refers to October 10, 2025, when a surprise 100% US tariff on Chinese imports triggered more than $19 billion in crypto liquidations, the largest in history. Bitcoin fell over 14% in hours and more than 1.6 million accounts were wiped out. A year later, market depth and liquidity have not fully recovered and investors remain wary of leverage, which is why the market still reacts sharply to macro shocks.

Will the Fed raise interest rates at the October 2026 meeting?

As of mid-October, interest-rate futures put the odds of the Federal Reserve holding its target range at 3.75% to 4.00% on October 28 at roughly 84%, versus about a 16% chance of another quarter-point hike. Chair Kevin Warsh has declined to signal his intentions, and a hot September inflation print has kept a second hike on the table, so the October decision and the December meeting are both live risks for markets.

What Bitcoin price levels matter most right now?

The key pivot is the low $80,000s, where the average cost basis of the US spot ETFs (around $81,500) sits right at spot. Below that, support stacks at the True Market Mean near $78,000 and the short-term holder cost basis around $73,300. On the upside, $84,000 is the first hurdle and about $88,000 is the bigger ceiling, because that is where buyers from the last six to twelve months can finally sell at break-even.

What are analysts’ Bitcoin price targets for the end of 2026?

Most major banks cut their targets during 2026. Standard Chartered now sees $100,000, Citi $113,000 (on a twelve-month view), Bernstein $125,000, and JPMorgan $150,000 to $170,000. More bullish holdouts include Tom Lee of Fundstrat at $200,000 to $250,000 and Galaxy Digital’s Alex Thorn at $250,000, though he calls it highly uncertain. Published forecasts now range from the high $30,000s to $250,000.

Marcus Okafor is a markets writer at HOGE Wire, covering Bitcoin price action, macro and market structure for English-speaking readers. This article is journalism, not investment advice.