Bitcoin Falls Below $80,000 and Longs Absorb Over 90% of the Losses

Bitcoin traded below $80,000 on Saturday, and the traders who lost money were almost all betting it would go up. Two accounts of the day's forced selling were filed about two hours apart, both reading the same CoinGlass dashboard, and they do not agree on how much was closed out. They do agree on the lopsidedness. Longs were above 90% of what was liquidated in bitcoin and in ether alike. The price came back over $80,000 within a couple of hours.

Two bursts, fifteen minutes each

The Block, filing at 17:43 UTC, counted $436.44 million liquidated across crypto in the four hours to 1 p.m. New York time, of which $404.15 million were long positions. Most of it came in two short windows. One took $208.21 million of longs in the quarter hour from 10:15 a.m., as bitcoin dropped from about $80,640 to $80,100, and the next took $131.17 million from 11:15 a.m. The low was about $79,280 at around 11:20 a.m., and by 1 p.m. the price was back at $80,138. By The Block's reckoning that was the largest four-hour run of long liquidations since 14 October, when $505.57 million went.

Same dashboard, different totals

BeInCrypto had filed at 15:47 UTC and put the 24-hour liquidation total at $837.12 million across 227,681 traders. The Block's later figure is smaller, at $815.26 million and 201,012 traders. A rolling window would normally make the later number the bigger one, so timing does not explain the gap, and nothing read here settles which figure supersedes which. DL News reported a much larger total of $1.6 billion over 24 hours. It also carried a claim that Saturday was the first time bitcoin had been under $80,000 since April. We could not open that page. CryptoJazz reported bitcoin under $82,000 on Thursday morning, which the April reading does not sit easily beside. The one figure both outlets give identically is the day's biggest single order, an $11.85 million ether long on Binance.

Where the losses landed

Ether came close to bitcoin on a much smaller base. The Block put ether at $136.72 million of its four-hour total against bitcoin's $158.45 million, with ether worth about 18% of bitcoin's market capitalisation. Longs were 94.2% of the bitcoin figure and 92.7% of the ether one. BeInCrypto's 24-hour split has bitcoin ahead at $232.55 million and ether at $181.51 million, with longs above 93% of each. Those are different windows, so the two sets sit side by side without conflict. Venue concentration was stark. Binance accounted for $226.07 million of the four-hour total, 96% of it longs, and Hyperliquid for $70.47 million at 99.8% longs. Open interest in crypto futures fell 2.2% to $140.10 billion.

The funds were already selling

US spot bitcoin ETFs lost $137.94 million on Friday, a second negative session in a row. BlackRock's IBIT was $110.34 million of that, Fidelity's FBTC $31.78 million, and Morgan Stanley's MSBT took in $4.19 million against the tide. The week still finished in the black at $304.73 million, because Monday to Wednesday brought in $1.078 billion before Thursday's $635 million outflow turned it around. Ether funds took $4.35 million on Friday and have run negative on 14 of October's 17 trading days. Arthur Hayes said overnight that he had closed out the directional book at his family office.

"I dumped it all," Hayes wrote at 2:18 a.m. New York time on Saturday.

He listed profits taken on ether and two other tokens, and said he thought the market had "gotta go down to go up". Glassnode puts the average price companies with bitcoin on their balance sheets paid at about $80,000, on BeInCrypto's account alone. That would leave the average corporate position underwater. The Federal Reserve meets on 27 and 28 October, with September inflation data due on the 29th. BeInCrypto's own analysis flags $77,876 as the next level below, and that is its reading rather than a consensus one. Whether the liquidation figures ever converge is a separate question, and three totals are on the record for one Saturday afternoon.