Bitcoin Drops Below $80K as Crypto Liquidations Top $834M

Bitcoin did break below $80,000 on Saturday. CoinGlass showed BTC at $79,624.6 around 08:30 UTC, down 2.5% over 24 hours. By then, more than $834 million in leveraged crypto positions had been forced shut in a single day.

Most of that money was on the wrong side of the move. Long positions, bets that prices would rise, made up $701.14 million of the 24-hour total, or about 84%.

A Rebound That Didn't Hold

Earlier in the week, Bitcoin tried to climb back toward $85,000 and couldn't keep the gains. Saturday's break came a few days after it first slipped below $81,000, so this is a second leg down rather than a sudden shock.

Demand from US spot Bitcoin ETFs cooled at the same time. The funds saw about $635.6 million in net outflows on Thursday, 22 October, and another $137.9 million on Friday. That is roughly $773.5 million leaving over two sessions, though these daily figures haven't yet been checked against the fund-flow trackers themselves.

Ether, Solana and XRP Fell Harder

The large caps dropped further than Bitcoin in percentage terms. Here's where they stood in the same CoinGlass snapshot:

Solana is now trading under $100. Ether's slide shows up in the liquidation data too. ETH positions accounted for $183.98 million of liquidations, not far behind Bitcoin's $235.84 million, even though Bitcoin's market is much larger. The single biggest liquidation of the day was an ETH long on Binance's ETHUSDT pair, worth $11.85 million.

How the Liquidations Piled Up

A liquidation happens when a trader borrows to enlarge a position and the price moves far enough against them that their deposit no longer covers the loss. The exchange then closes the trade automatically. In a falling market, those forced sales can push prices lower and trigger the next batch.

That's what the numbers suggest happened on Saturday. CoinGlass counted 219,115 traders liquidated over 24 hours. The damage was heavily one-sided:

• 24 hours: $701.14 million in longs against $133.17 million in shorts.
• 4 hours: $403.67 million in longs against $25.93 million in shorts.
• By coin: 95.1% of Bitcoin liquidations and 93.2% of Ether liquidations were longs.

The four-hour figures are the telling part. About $429.6 million, roughly half of the full day's total, was wiped out in those four hours alone, which lines up with the break below $80,000. Earlier hourly readings reported during the day couldn't be checked against the live data, so the four-hour window is the clearest short-term picture available.

Does US - Iran Tension Matter for Crypto? Link Is Not Confirmed

Some market coverage tied the drop to reports that the US and Israel could be preparing fresh strikes on Iran. Geopolitical uncertainty can affect crypto through the same channels that influence other risk assets. Investors may reduce exposure to volatile investments when the risk of a wider conflict increases.

These factors do not guarantee that Bitcoin will fall. They help explain why geopolitical headlines can coincide with weaker crypto prices, particularly when traders are using leverage. The timing may fit, but the cause isn't established.

What is established sits in the derivatives data. A market leaning heavily toward rising prices met a round-number level, and more than $700 million in long bets got closed out on the way through it.