Bitcoin Holds Near $78,000 as an AI Warning Hits Chip Stocks

Bitcoin sat around $78,200 on Monday while the equity market it usually tracks went the other way. Nasdaq 100 futures were down more than 1.5% by late morning in London, with chipmakers leading, after a weekend essay by Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei argued for slowing AI development. Crypto did not follow. Ninety-four of the 100 constituents of the CoinDesk 100 index were higher at 10:09 UTC, on CoinDesk's own tally. One session is not a broken correlation, and nothing published on Monday claims otherwise.

Four accounts, two baselines

The level is agreed. The direction is not. CoinDesk had bitcoin at $78,280 at 10:09 UTC, up 1.93% since midnight. CryptoSlate published $78,154.53 and a gain of 1.97% over a rolling 24 hours. The Crypto Times had $78,150 at 10:00 UTC, up 1.9%, inside a daily range of $76,367 to $78,200. Yahoo Finance, timestamped 11:31 UTC, printed $77,873.33 and a fall of 0.6%.

That last pair does not hold together on its own terms. Yahoo gives Sunday's open as $76,806.19, which is below the price it prints, so a decline of 0.6% does not follow from the two figures in the same paragraph. Ether has the same problem in the same piece, quoted at $2,514.09 and down 2% from an open of $2,475.82. Three accounts say up and one says down, none names the baseline it prefers, and they do not reconcile.

Chips fell and software did not

The selling inside the equity move was narrow. Nvidia was off more than 2%, Intel and Marvell close to 6% and AMD near 5%, on CryptoSlate's Monday figures; CoinDesk's premarket numbers land in the same place, at 2.4%, 5.6% and 6.3% for the first three. Software went the other way. ServiceNow gained 3%, with Adobe and Workday up 2.5% each. South Korea's Kospi closed 3.26% lower.

The index futures differ by a hair between the two accounts. CoinDesk had the Nasdaq 100 contract down 1.65% at 10:09 UTC. CryptoSlate, quoting a 4:46 a.m. ET snapshot, had it down 1.72%. Both put S&P 500 futures at minus 0.70%, and the gap on the Nasdaq contract is seven basis points across two timestamps.

The metals went with the stocks

Gold fell 0.8% and silver 1.7% on Monday, with the dollar index up 0.5%, on CoinDesk's figures. Bitcoin rising while gold slipped cuts against the pattern of the past few months, when the two moved together often enough for the 90-day correlation to clear 50%. Crude was the outlier of the session, up close to 4% and above $100 a barrel for the first time since May. CryptoSlate puts Brent at $108.31 and West Texas Intermediate at $103.35.

Positioning stayed mild into the meeting

Nothing in the derivatives data suggests traders leaned hard on Monday's divergence. Aggregate open interest stood at $59.7 billion, the bitcoin funding rate at 0.0066% against a predicted 0.0081%, and Deribit's September and November futures at annualised premiums of 5.5% and 5.8%. Those are quiet numbers. The Federal Reserve's two-day meeting opens on Tuesday, and Yahoo, citing CME Group's FedWatch tool, put the odds of an increase at 86.5% on Monday morning against 69.4% on Friday.

Bitcoin is still below the $82,284 it reached earlier this month, and below the level it held before August core inflation came in hot on Friday. The Crypto Times is alone in this sweep in mapping support at $75,000 to $76,500 and resistance from $81,000 upward, and in reporting that Stage Two Research counted none of its nine bottom conditions as confirmed on Monday. Take that as one desk's reading. What Monday settled is narrower: on one day, with equities falling for a reason that had nothing to do with crypto, crypto did not fall.