Bitcoin Breaks Below $80,000 as August Payrolls Come In at 162,000

Bitcoin fell through $80,000 on Friday after the August employment report landed at 162,000 jobs, against a consensus estimate of 56,000. The figure came in near three times what economists had penciled in and more than five times the 31,000 monthly average of the preceding year. Traders took it as a reason for the Federal Reserve to hold or raise in September instead of cutting, and bitcoin gave up about 3% intraday. It was back near $79,900 by Saturday morning. The funds buying it never stopped.

The strength was narrower than the headline

Two sectors did most of the work. Food services and drinking places added 59,000 jobs and local government education 42,000, on the breakdown CryptoSlate and crypto.news both carried on Saturday. Information employment fell by 23,000. The unemployment rate held at 4.1%, and average hourly earnings rose 0.3% in August to $37.75, up 3.1% over the year. Revisions cut June to 31,000 and July to 21,000, which leaves August standing well above the months either side of it. Yields moved with the print. The 2-year Treasury went to about 4.40% from 4.33% and the 10-year to about 4.80% from 4.75%, with the dollar index up to 99.932 from 99.035.

Two counts of the same odds

How far the print moved the September meeting is not settled. crypto.news put the probability of an increase on 15-16 September at 61%, up from 52% before the release. CoinDesk put the same measure at 70%. Both were published within a day of each other, neither cites the other, and the two do not reconcile. Before the print those odds had been falling. Benzinga had them near 52% on Friday morning against 63.2% on Wednesday, and a week earlier this desk reported the same measure stalling below 60% while bitcoin held $78,000. crypto.news adds that Citigroup has pushed its next-cut forecast out to June 2027 from October 2026; that forecast sits in one account and no other outlet reviewed here carries it.

Nobody agrees where the low was

Friday's bottom is on the record three ways. CryptoSlate gives an intraday low of $78,660. crypto.news gives a 24-hour low of $78,723. This desk's own Thursday-and-Friday range, published on Saturday, ran from $79,716 to $81,200, and it contains neither of the other two figures. None of the three names the venue it measured, and we could not establish which reading covers the same hours. Saturday's level is barely firmer ground: $79,995.36 on CryptoSlate's screen, $79,912 on crypto.news's, about $79,886 on COINOTAG's Binance quote.

The funds kept buying

Money went in while the price came down. US spot bitcoin funds took $175 million on Friday, a third straight day of inflows, with BlackRock's IBIT at $117 million and Fidelity's FBTC at $57.2 million on SoSoValue's tally. That is roughly a fifth of the previous session's $730.87 million, the biggest inflow day since January. Rachael Lucas, a crypto analyst at BTC Markets, had set out the risk to that run the day before the release, in comments carried by The Block.

"Near-term, the risk is data. Jobs, then CPI. Waller conditioned the dovish read on inflation cooling, so a hot print reverses the premise directly," Lucas said.

The jobs half of that has now landed. August CPI is due on 11 September, four days before the committee meets, and it is the last scheduled reading in front of the decision. COINOTAG counted roughly 81,700 bitcoin options contracts worth $6.44 billion nearing expiry, with calls clustered at the $80,000 and $75,000 strikes; that count appears in one place only. Whether Friday's break holds is a question for the CPI print more than for the chart.