Bitcoin Falls to $80,350 as Short-Term Holders Sell at a Loss

Bitcoin traded down to $80,350 on Bitstamp early on Friday, its lowest price since 18 September, before buyers carried it back toward $82,500 later in the session. Cointelegraph put the low at that level on Friday morning. CryptoSlate, writing the evening before, had the floor near $80,000 instead. The slide closed out more than a billion dollars of leveraged positions on most of the tallies published since. It followed a day in which buyers of the past few months moved a large quantity of coins onto exchanges at a loss.

The liquidation totals do not line up

CoinGlass data reached two outlets as two different numbers for what is nominally the same window. CryptoSlate, citing CoinGlass on Thursday evening, reported $1.16 billion liquidated across crypto derivatives in 24 hours, with $108 million of that in shorts and 166,769 accounts closed. Cointelegraph, citing the same provider for the 24 hours to 10 a.m. UTC on Friday, reported $1.09 billion, of which $1.05 billion was long. ICOBench put the total above $1 billion with roughly $940 million in longs. CoinGabbar said $1.08 billion. Tekedia said $644 million.

They do not reconcile. We could not establish which hours each provider is measuring, and none of the five states its window. Ether carried more of the damage than bitcoin did, at roughly $324 million against about $240 million on CryptoSlate's reading of the CoinGlass figures; the summary box on that same page gives $327 million and $300 million for those two lines. The largest single position closed was an ether contract worth about $20 million on Hyperliquid.

Coins sold into exchanges at a loss

Amr Taha, a contributor to the analytics firm CryptoQuant, wrote that holders of up to six months sent 55,600 BTC to exchanges at a loss on Thursday. CryptoQuant's charts, as CryptoSlate read them a day earlier, showed more than 50,000 BTC moving at the 24-hour peak, with a caption beneath putting it at 45,600. The loss-making share appears twice in that account, once as more than 29,500 coins and once as 24,900. Neither report states its window precisely. The direction is the only part both agree on.

"Bitcoin is currently failing its retest of ~$82500," the analyst Rekt Capital wrote on X on Thursday.

CryptoQuant said Thursday's loss-driven transfers exceeded those of 26 June, when bitcoin traded below $60,000, and described the losses involved as the largest among short-term holders in nearly four months. Taha set the two episodes against each other on price: bitcoin was above $81,000 this week, against $59,300 in June.

Where the bids were sitting

Glassnode's weekly report on 7 October described resting buy orders between $81,000 and $81,250 on Binance's spot book, accumulated since 3 October and the largest visible block of bids beneath the price. Friday's low went through it. The firm also mapped a concentration of liquidation levels between $81,700 and $83,300, with a second cluster closer to $75,000. The cascade landed in the first of those. Bitcoin had already broken under $84,000 in Tuesday night's session.

Fund flows pointed the same way all week. US spot bitcoin funds shed $244.1 million on Thursday on the daily data CryptoBriefing and TokenPost both used, while ICOBench, citing Sosovalue, put that session at $238.6 million; those two do not reconcile either. Spot ether funds lost $72.5 million the same day, an eighth consecutive session of withdrawals. Cointelegraph also lists a reported movement of seized government coins among the events that preceded Thursday's selling. No account read for this story connects that transfer to the short-term holder flows.

A range, not a number

Nobody has published a reconciled figure for Thursday night. Five providers measured one cascade and produced five totals, two of them from the same data source, and the gap between the smallest and the largest is roughly half a billion dollars. The $81,000 block of bids that absorbed earlier selling has now been spent, and the next mapped cluster of resting demand sits near $75,000. Until a provider states its hours, the size of the week's worst session stays a range.