Bitcoin Slips Below $80K and Drags Altcoins Even Lower

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• Bitcoin briefly slipped below a level it had closed above every day since mid-September.
• Forced closures of leveraged long bets made up most of the day’s liquidations.
• Altcoins lost more ground than Bitcoin, lifting its share of the total crypto market.
• Bitcoin now trades under two moving averages that supported it for weeks.

Bitcoin slipped below $80,000 on Saturday, October 24, touching roughly $79,800 on Binance before buyers lifted it back to about $80,400, as a broad crypto sell-off forced the closure of $645 million in leveraged positions over 24 hours. The level carries weight beyond its round number: Bitcoin has closed above it every day since September 18, and Glassnode data places the average purchase price of publicly listed Bitcoin treasury companies close to $80,000, so a sustained break would push a large group of corporate holders into paper losses.

Longs Took $504 Million of the Damage

Long positions accounted for $504.53 million of the $645.36 million liquidated across crypto in the past day, according to Coinglass liquidation data, while shorts lost $140.83 million. Bitcoin led the list with $145.79 million, 93.5% of it from longs, and Ether followed at $106.89 million with a 92% long share. IRYS stood out as the exception, with $67.61 million liquidated and 84.5% of that coming from traders who had bet on a decline in the token.

Source: Coinglass, 24-hour window to October 24.

Why $80,000 Turned Into a Trigger

A liquidation happens when an exchange closes a leveraged trade because the trader’s deposited margin no longer covers the loss. For a long position, that closure is a market sell order, and each forced sale pushes the price toward the next group of positions with thin margin. Coinbase’s research team noted that the largest cluster of net long Bitcoin positions was opened around $81,993, which means a large share of bullish leveraged exposure has been losing money since Bitcoin fell under $82,000 on Thursday. Round numbers such as $80,000 also gather stop-loss orders, so the price had a dense layer of automatic selling waiting just beneath it.

The cleanup looks incomplete. Bitcoin futures open interest, which measures the total value of contracts still open, stood at $53.58 billion early Saturday according to Coinglass, above the $52 billion area it occupied for much of the late summer. Leverage that survives a flush can either fuel a fast rebound through short covering or feed a second wave of forced selling if support gives way.

Altcoins Fell Faster Than Bitcoin

Total crypto market capitalization dropped 1.56% to $2.69 trillion, and most large caps underperformed Bitcoin’s 1.86% daily decline, which keeps Bitcoin’s share of the market near 60%. Ether slid 2.56% to $2,327.93, extending a weak October in which U.S. spot Ether ETFs lost $1.08 billion through October 21, their largest monthly outflow of 2026 according to SoSoValue ETF data. Solana fell under $100 for the first time in weeks. BNB was the only top-ten non-stablecoin still in positive territory on a weekly basis.

Prices as of October 24. Source: CoinMarketCap

Hot Inflation and ETF Exits Drained Demand

The selling started well before Saturday. U.S. consumer prices rose 3.7% year over year in September, up from 3.4% in August according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI report, and a hotter producer price reading the following day revived talk that the Federal Reserve could tighten again. Spot Bitcoin ETF flows have swung hard since then. The funds took in about $528 million on October 21, then lost roughly $636 million in the next session, per Farside Investors ETF flow data. An ETF outflow hits the spot market directly, because the issuer sells Bitcoin from its holdings to pay out redeeming shareholders.

What the 4-Hour Chart Shows

Bitcoin was rejected near $85,000 on October 21 and has since dropped back under its 200-period exponential moving average on the 4-hour chart, now at $82,024, a line it had been trading around for most of the past two weeks. The same $79,800 to $80,000 zone stopped the decline on October 15, which makes Saturday the second test in ten days. The relative strength index sits at 33.21, which shows that sellers have controlled most 4-hour candles since Wednesday without yet reaching the near-30 readings that preceded the October 9 rebound to $84,000. On the daily chart, Bitcoin closed below its 50-day average near $81,784 on October 23, ending a run of 66 consecutive closes above it that began in August.

Where Treasury Holders Start Losing Money

Bulls need a return above the $81,500 to $82,000 band, where the 4-hour EMA, the 50-day average and the main cluster of long entries now overlap, before the pressure eases. A daily close under $80,000 would instead leave treasury companies with reported losses on average and raise the risk of selling from smaller holders that carry debt or dividend obligations. The next support on the chart sits around $78,000, where Bitcoin consolidated in mid-September before its run to $87,000. Weekend order books are thinner, so the first real read on institutional demand will come when ETF trading resumes on Monday.

Options traders had already scaled back their year-end expectations before Saturday’s dip. Nick Forster, founder of the crypto options platform Derive.xyz, said after the mid-October slide that the market-implied chance of Bitcoin reaching $100,000 by Christmas had fallen to 9.7%. With the Federal Reserve’s next policy meeting due later this month and the September inflation figure still running above the August pace, the rate decision now carries more weight for Bitcoin’s direction than any crypto-specific catalyst on the calendar.