Bitcoin Stalls Below $82,000 After IBIT's Biggest Day in a Year

Bitcoin traded around $81,400 on Tuesday morning, down half a percent since midnight UTC, and the day before had been the best one BlackRock's bitcoin fund has had in a year. Those two facts sit badly together. The iShares Bitcoin Trust took in $665.16 million on Monday, which The Block reported as its largest single day since 7 October 2025, drawing on SoSoValue data. Across all US spot bitcoin funds the net figure for the same session was $526.6 million, smaller than IBIT's alone because Fidelity and Grayscale products went the other way. The price has not responded.

Monday's money, Tuesday's price

CoinDesk put bitcoin at about $81,400 at 6:22 a.m. New York time, with ether off 0.9% near $2,385. The Block, filing three hours earlier, described bitcoin as consolidating between roughly $82,000 and $83,000, which is above where CoinDesk found it a few hours later. IBIT's net assets stand at $66.37 billion. Dominick John, an analyst at Zeus Research, told The Block the inflow pointed to institutional demand holding up despite the choppy tape, and then gave the other half of the reading.

"Persistent resistance suggests ETF buying is being absorbed by selling pressure," John said.

Min Jung, an associate researcher at Presto Research, framed the buying as possible positioning for a catch-up trade. "Unlike other risk assets trading near all-time highs, bitcoin has remained largely range-bound," she said. Neither analyst put a number on what is doing the absorbing.

A week of outflows against one day of inflows

The flow picture depends entirely on the window. crypto.news, writing at 07:57 UTC, put US spot bitcoin ETFs at about $228.6 million of net outflows over the past week, after roughly $681 million the week before, and CryptoTicker carried the same pair of weekly figures two hours later. The Block's Monday number runs the other way. One covers five sessions and one covers a single session, so they are not strictly contradictory, and no account read here sets them against each other. We could not establish which figure supersedes the other for the week now running. Spot ether funds are cleaner: $103.3 million out on Monday, a fourth straight negative day.

Two liquidation trackers, two totals

Forced selling cooled. CoinGlass counted $155.1 million of liquidations over 24 hours, down 54.7% from the previous day, with longs about 69% of the total on a CoinMarketCap tally. Coinalyze, cited in the same CoinDesk piece, tracked $120.6 million in all and put bitcoin and ether at roughly $30 million each. The two totals do not reconcile. This desk hit the same problem on 7 October, when four outlets published four different liquidation totals for one night. Open interest in bitcoin sat at $27.4 billion on Coinalyze, down 0.6% on the day, and aggregated funding ran near 8.8% annualised.

The options desk is paying for downside

Deribit traders bought protection. Puts outtraded calls by more than two to one over 24 hours. The busiest single contract was the 30 October $80,000 put, and out-of-the-money puts cost 2.5 to 4 volatility points more than equivalent calls across expiries. Open interest for that same expiry still leans toward calls struck between $90,000 and $100,000, so the positioning is not uniform. Glassnode's 19 October assessment said spot buyers and ETF investors were not generating enough counter demand to start a recovery, and noted transaction fees and transfer volumes each down about 10%. Bitfinex analysts put the level bitcoin needs to reclaim at $84,000.

Asian equities were weak, with the Kospi closing 3.73% lower at its worst level since 7 April. The macro calendar is the near-term constraint. September headline CPI came in at 3.7% against a 3.6% forecast, and bitcoin gave up $82,000 on the print last week. The Federal Reserve meets on 27 and 28 October. CryptoTicker alone reported that a 32 BTC sale by Strategy weighed on sentiment, and no other account read here mentions it. Support below Tuesday's level sits at $81,144, then $80,000. A day of ETF buying has not moved the ceiling.