Bitcoin slips below $84,000 on Wednesday, October 7, touching $83,840 at the low of the Asian morning session. Brent crude rose almost 1% to around $101.50 a barrel after Iran stepped up its attacks on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. Treasury yields and the dollar climbed with it, hours before the Federal Reserve publishes the minutes of its September meeting.
Key Takeaways
- Bitcoin slips to $83,840 on Wednesday morning, down from roughly $86,500 a day earlier.
- Crypto liquidations hit $555.6M over 24 hours, with $487.2M coming from long positions.
- Brent near $101.50 and a 5.31% US 10-year yield arrive just ahead of the Fed minutes.
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ChatGPTBitcoin Slips to $83,840 and Drags Altcoins Lower
On Tuesday, bitcoin was still changing hands around $86,500. Overnight it lost more than 2%, touched $83,840, then steadied at $84,025.99, down 2.30% over 24 hours. Even after the drop, the price sits inside the $83,000 to $87,000 band it has held for two weeks, a ceiling set when bitcoin hit $87,000 on Monday, September 21, its highest level since January.
When bitcoin slips like this, the rest of the market follows, though the damage is uneven. Ether lost 3.63% to $2,617.76, XRP shed 2.39% to $1.47 and Solana gave up 1.58% to $118.59. Dogecoin posted the steepest drop among the major tokens, down 5% to around 9 cents. Hyperliquid’s HYPE token fell nearly 4% to about $91.
Leveraged buyers absorbed most of the hit. CoinGlass, which aggregates liquidation data across derivatives exchanges, counted $555.6M in forced closures over the 24 hours to late Tuesday, $487.2M of it from long positions. The final four hours of that window alone accounted for $429.8M, with longs making up $415.3M.
ETF flows added to the pressure from the first day of the week. On Monday, October 6, SoSoValue’s daily tracker of spot ETF flows showed $89.9M leaving US spot bitcoin ETFs, ending a two-session run of inflows worth $293M. Spot ether ETFs logged their fifth straight day of outflows, $206M in total.
Brent at $101.50 Lifts the US 10-Year Yield to 5.31%
The trigger sits in the Strait of Hormuz, where Iran has escalated its attacks on tankers. Brent rose almost 1% in response and now trades around $101.50 a barrel. The pattern echoes July 8, when US strikes on Iran sent oil higher and bitcoin lower, with Brent trading near $74 at the time.
Higher crude fed straight into rates and currencies. The US 10-year Treasury yield gained 3 basis points to 5.31%, and the dollar strengthened against every G10 currency. Bitcoin slips as oil, long-term yields and the dollar all move higher at the same time.
That is a sharp turn from late September. Bitcoin gained about 40% over the third quarter, and spot bitcoin ETFs drew $6.5B in net inflows over the same stretch. As recently as September 23, steady ETF demand and cheaper oil helped bitcoin hold $86,400 after a short squeeze worth more than $1B.
By Wednesday morning, both of those September tailwinds had reversed, with ETFs seeing outflows and oil climbing again. Bitcoin slips in that setting while staying, for now, inside its two-week range.
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Fed Minutes Land Before the October 27-28 Meeting
The Federal Reserve releases the minutes of its September 15-16 meeting on Wednesday. At that meeting, the FOMC raised its target range by a quarter point to 3.75% to 4%, in a 12-0 vote. Bitcoin held around $76,000 after that first hike since 2023.
The minutes come out three weeks after the decision, the standard lag on the committee’s calendar. In late August, Fed Chair Kevin Warsh’s Jackson Hole speech pushed bitcoin below $78,000 and lifted the implied probability of a September hike to 59.7%, a hike that did arrive.
The next rate decision is due at the October 27-28 meeting, the last one before December 8-9 on the calendar the Fed publishes.
Until then, the two forces explaining why bitcoin slips this week sit outside crypto itself, namely the price of a barrel and the path of US interest rates.
So far the price has held above $83,000, the bottom of the range bitcoin has traded in for the past two weeks.
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