Bitcoin’s October slowdown masks underlying strength, analysts say

  • Bitcoin is lagging in October, but analysts say its stability signals strength.
  • The “digital gold” is failing to rally alongside gold, which is hitting new highs.
  • One analyst says a massive move, similar to late 2024, “will start very soon.”

A strange and deceptive calm has settled over the Bitcoin market.

While its analog cousin, gold, is once again surging to new all-time highs and US stocks are basking in the green, the king of crypto remains stuck in a frustrating holding pattern, stubbornly refusing to join the party.

But for some of the market’s sharpest observers, this is not a sign of weakness; it is the quiet coiling of a spring, the calm before a powerful and imminent storm.

The price action has been a familiar and frustrating story for the bulls. Bitcoin has slipped 1.2 percent over the past 24 hours to $111,500, with the rest of the crypto sector seeing even steeper losses.

But beneath this sluggish surface, a powerful undercurrent of institutional demand and a shifting macroeconomic tide are quietly building a case for a major breakout.

A prophecy of a powerful move

Speaking at the Digital Asset Summit in London on Wednesday, Quinn Thompson, the chief investment officer at Lekker Capital, delivered a bold and bullish prophecy.

He argued that Bitcoin’s current decoupling from gold is a temporary anomaly that is about to violently correct itself.

“I posit that we will catch up to gold,” he told the audience. 

“It will start very soon and the move that is about to come in bitcoin and crypto broadly will resemble a November 2024 and an October 2023 type of move.” 

These were periods of explosive, parabolic growth, and Thompson’s prediction is a clear signal that he believes a similar fire is about to be lit.

A ‘floor’ of demand, a path to $150,000

This view is not held in isolation. Matt Mena, a crypto research analyst at 21Shares, voiced a similar outlook, arguing that Bitcoin’s remarkable durability in the face of global uncertainty is a testament to its underlying strength.

This, he says, is “underscoring how structural demand—anchored by ETF inflows and a more dovish policy outlook—continues to provide a floor.”

With the speculative leverage recently flushed out of the system and a new era of monetary easing on the horizon, Mena is now projecting that Bitcoin could climb to $150,000 before the end of the year.

The shadow of the Fed looms large

The key to unlocking this potential, all agree, lies with the US Federal Reserve. The market’s conviction that the central bank is on a firm path to continue easing its monetary policy is the primary engine of the current “risk-on” mood.

That conviction was strengthened on Wednesday with the release of the Fed’s Beige Book, which reported growing signs of weakness in the US labor market.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell himself has acknowledged this “softness,” a clear signal to the market that further rate cuts are very much on the table for the two remaining policy meetings this year.

For now, Bitcoin waits, a sleeping giant biding its time. But if the analysts are right, it is a slumber that is about to come to a spectacular and explosive end.

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Crypto markets turn red after Trump threatens to halt cooking oil imports from China

  • The crypto market turned red after a new tariff threat from President Trump.
  • Trump threatened to halt cooking oil imports from China over soybean purchases.
  • Bitcoin fell 2.4 percent and Ether dropped 3.3 percent within an hour of the post.

A single social media post has once again sent a jolt of fear through the cryptocurrency market, as a fresh and unconventional tariff threat from US President Donald Trump ignited a new wave of selling, plunging the entire digital asset space into the red.

The sudden downturn is a stark and painful reminder of the market’s extreme sensitivity to the president’s every whim, a fragility that was brutally exposed in a historic liquidation event just last week.

An ‘economically hostile act,’ an immediate market reaction

The catalyst for the latest sell-off was a post on Truth Social on October 14, in which President Trump took aim at Beijing’s trade behavior, specifically its failure to purchase American soybeans.

“I believe that China purposefully [is] not buying our Soybeans, and causing difficulty for our Soybean Farmers, [which] is an Economically Hostile Act,” Trump wrote.

We are considering terminating business with China having to do with Cooking Oil, and other elements of Trade, as retribution. As an example, we can easily produce Cooking Oil ourselves, we don’t need to purchase it from China.

The market’s reaction was immediate and severe. Within an hour of the post, Bitcoin (BTC) had dropped by 2.4 percent to around $112,861, while Ether (ETH) fell 3.3 percent to $4,108.

The total crypto market capitalization declined by roughly 2.9 percent, a clear and direct response to the president’s latest trade war gambit.

The ghost of liquidations past

This latest sell-off, while significant, is a mere aftershock compared to the earthquake that rocked the market last week.

A previous threat from Trump to impose 100 percent tariffs on all Chinese imports had triggered a violent and historic crash.

At its peak, that “bloodbath” saw more than 19.2 billion dollars in leveraged positions liquidated, marking the largest single-day wipeout in crypto’s history and overwhelming major trading platforms like Binance and Coinbase.

The memory of that carnage is still fresh, and it has left the market in a deeply fragile and nervous state.

Even before Trump’s latest post, crypto analysts had been warning of an impending market crash, with one popular analyst telling the trading community on October 13 to exit the market as a “big dump” was coming.

A market on a knife’s edge

The latest data from Coinglass shows that the market is still bleeding from last week’s wounds.

Over the past 24 hours, another 715.13 million dollars in positions have been liquidated, the vast majority of which were bullish long positions.

This new wave of selling, sparked by a presidential post about soybeans and cooking oil, is a potent symbol of the strange and unpredictable forces that now govern the digital asset space.

In a market haunted by the ghost of a historic crash and stalked by the whims of a single Twitter feed, the only certainty is more uncertainty to come.

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Beyond Bitcoin: How Asia’s new crypto playbook is breaking from the west

  • A reported $600 million BNB fund signals a shift in Asia’s crypto strategy.
  • Asian institutions are favoring ‘infrastructure tokens’ over store-of-value.
  • The West tokenizes TradFi, while the East builds crypto-native liquidity.

On the surface, it looks like a straightforward bet on a crypto behemoth.

The reported plan by China Renaissance to raise 600 million dollars for a BNB-focused investment vehicle, with Binance founder Changpeng Zhao’s own YZi Labs investing alongside, seems like a simple vote of confidence in the world’s largest crypto exchange.

But according to some of the market’s sharpest observers, this is something far deeper: a clear and powerful signal that a great divergence is underway, a fundamental split in how the East and the West are choosing to build their crypto empires.

A tale of two strategies: The great divide

While Western markets have been laser-focused on tokenizing traditional finance—turning Treasuries, funds, and real-world assets into digital tokens—a different playbook is being written in Asia.

According to the Singapore-based market maker Enflux, the China Renaissance move is a prime example of a broader and more profound strategic shift.

“Regional capital allocators are seeking exposure to infrastructure tokens that drive transaction flow, not just store-of-value assets,” Enflux said in a note to CoinDesk.

This ties into the broader shift where Asian capital markets are building out their own layer of crypto-native liquidity networks while Western markets tokenized TradFi.

Value in motion, not just in scarcity

The logic behind this divergence is both simple and powerful: in the long run, value should be captured not just by scarcity, but by activity.

Assets like BNB are the perfect embodiment of this philosophy. While Binance is not a publicly traded company, its BNB token serves as a powerful proxy, its value a direct reflection of the market’s confidence in the health and activity of the entire Binance ecosystem.

This is not an isolated trend. The recent move by Tron to create a publicly listed company is another key example.

The goal is to give investors direct, regulated exposure to the activity on the TRX network, a bustling hub for USDT transactions across Latin America.

It is a bet on the utility and the velocity of the network, not just the static value of its native token.

The blueprint for a new financial architecture

If this thesis is correct, then the China Renaissance fund is more than just a new investment vehicle; it is an early blueprint for the next generation of institutional products in Asia. These are not funds designed to simply hold digital gold.

They are permanent capital vehicles designed to own the very pipes of the crypto economy.
The message is clear.

While the West is focused on bringing the old world onto the blockchain, the East is increasingly focused on building a new world, with its own native financial architecture.

The great game of crypto is no longer being played by one set of rules; it has become a tale of two very different, and potentially competing, visions for the future.

Market movement

BTC: Bitcoin is trading above 114,500 dollars, holding relatively flat as the market finds its footing and stabilizes after the volatility of the previous weekend.

ETH: Ethereum has risen 1.5 percent to 4,230 dollars as network activity shows signs of picking up, a move of resilience that comes even as US-listed Ethereum ETFs saw 118 million dollars in outflows.

Gold: Gold has surged 2 percent to a new record of 4,103 dollars an ounce. The powerful move is being driven by renewed US-China trade tensions and the growing expectation of further Federal Reserve rate cuts, which are sending investors fleeing toward safe-haven assets.

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Crypto Black Friday explained: How $19.5 billion vanished in hours

  • Bitcoin plunged 8.4% as liquidity collapsed across exchanges.
  • Oracle glitches triggered cross-liquidations and temporary de-pegs.
  • The crash exposed major vulnerabilities in crypto infrastructure.

On 10–11 October 2025, the cryptocurrency market experienced one of its sharpest collapses in years — an event the community has dubbed Crypto Black Friday.

In just a few hours, more than $19.5 billion in leveraged positions were wiped out, sending Bitcoin down by 8.4% and shaking investor confidence worldwide.

What began as a reaction to the US’s 100% tariff announcement on Chinese goods quickly revealed much deeper cracks in the system — showing how automated trading, thin liquidity, and structural weaknesses combined to trigger a chain reaction across exchanges.

What triggered the sell-off?

The first signs of the crash appeared after President Trump confirmed steep new tariffs on Chinese imports, fuelling fears of higher inflation and tighter Federal Reserve policy.

Traders rushed to unwind risky positions, leading to rapid liquidations in Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Wrapped Beacon ETH (WBETH), and Binance-Smart-based Solana (BNSOL).

But geopolitical panic alone doesn’t explain how billions disappeared so quickly. Analysts say technical and structural factors amplified the event.

Liquidity across exchanges was unusually low, and some Binance users reported frozen accounts during the sell-off.

High-leverage looped loans and a temporary de-pegging of the USDE stablecoin made matters worse, creating a cascade of forced sales. Binance later confirmed system issues and offered compensation to affected users.

How technical flaws magnified the collapse

According to a BeinCrypto report, during the sell-off, CoinGlass — a popular analytics site — faced a sophisticated proxy attack that briefly disabled access to its data and services.

This interruption added to market confusion just as traders were scrambling for real-time information.

At the same time, a series of unusually large transactions occurred moments before several oracle updates.

These oracles — the systems that feed real-world prices into blockchain smart contracts — briefly mispriced certain assets, triggering automatic liquidations across multiple trading pairs.

The mispricing also caused some stablecoins to lose their peg temporarily, creating brief windows where arbitrage bots and high-frequency traders could profit.

Within minutes, millions of dollars moved between exchanges as automated systems responded to the volatility, deepening the market crash.

Was it a coordinated attack?

Not everyone believes this was an organic crash. Some analysts argue that the patterns of trades and timing of oracle updates suggest deliberate manipulation.

Data showed that the most extreme de-pegs affected pairs with known update schedules, while large-scale short positions were placed just before liquidation cascades began.

This has led to speculation that certain market actors may have exploited the structure of the crypto market itself — using automated systems and leverage mechanisms to engineer volatility.

The idea is that, rather than hacking wallets or stealing funds, attackers could manipulate the market by exploiting predictable behaviours in oracles, exchanges, and algorithms.

Still, other experts maintain that this was simply an overleveraged market reacting to stress.

When traders take on too much debt and sentiment shifts suddenly, cascading liquidations can happen without any external interference.

The synchronised nature of the event across multiple exchanges, however, continues to fuel debate.

What the crash revealed about crypto markets

Crypto Black Friday has exposed how fragile the digital asset ecosystem remains despite its growing size.

With $19.5 billion wiped out in hours, the event showed how quickly risk can spread when systems rely heavily on leverage, automated trading, and opaque liquidity pools.

Exchanges such as Binance have since launched internal audits and pledged to improve transparency, but experts warn that these are short-term fixes.

The real challenge lies in redesigning core systems — including how leverage is managed, how oracles feed data, and how liquidity is distributed across markets.

The incident has renewed calls for better on-chain oversight and global standards for crypto risk management.

For a trillion-dollar market to mature, analysts say it must balance innovation with stronger safeguards against both systemic shocks and sophisticated manipulation.

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Bitcoin, Ethereum rebound following ‘largest single-day wipeout in crypto history’

  • The crypto market suffered its “largest single-day wipeout in crypto history.”
  • Nearly $20 billion in liquidations were triggered on Friday alone.
  • The crash was sparked by President Trump’s new tariff threats against China.

It was a brutal and historic bloodbath, a sudden and violent purge that resulted in what one analyst has called “the largest single-day wipeout in crypto history.”

A promising “Uptober” rally was brought to a catastrophic halt on Friday as a geopolitical bombshell from the White House sent a shockwave of fear through the global markets, triggering a cascade of liquidations that erased nearly $20 billion from the digital asset space in a single day.

The carnage was swift and merciless. Over a harrowing seven-hour period, Bitcoin plunged from the relative safety of $121,000 to a grim low of $109,000.

The pain was felt across the market, with Ethereum dipping to $3,686 and Solana touching just above $173.

But the real story was in the leveraged positions that were being systematically annihilated.

The volatile session triggered a “flash crash of liquidations,” wiping out almost 7 billion across all markets within a single hour, with a staggering 5.5 billion of that coming from bullish long positions, Sean Dawson, head of research at Dervie, told Decrypt.

By the time the dust settled, the majority of the day’s nearly 20 billion in liquidations—a colossal 16.7 billion—had come from longs, according to CoinGlass data.

The presidential spark: A tariff threat ignites a firestorm

This was not a crypto-specific crisis; it was a contagion of fear sparked by the highest office in the United States.

The sell-off across both crypto and traditional markets followed President Trump’s stunning announcement that he was canceling a planned meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping and had ordered a “massive increase” in tariffs on Chinese imports.

The threat, which Trump himself acknowledged could be “potentially painful” for Americans, immediately sent risk assets into a tailspin.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq dipped 3.6 percent, the S&P 500 fell 2.7 percent, and the Dow dropped 1.9 percent, a clear sign that the market was taking the president’s words as a declaration of a new and more aggressive phase in the trade war.

The aftermath: A textbook relief rally

But just as quickly as the storm descended, a fragile calm began to return.

By the weekend, China appeared to soften its stance, and a market that had been gripped by panic began to recalibrate, with analysts suggesting the brutal rout may have been a brief, if violent, geopolitical overreaction.

Now, a powerful rebound is underway. “What we’re seeing is a textbook relief rally,” Dean Serroni, CEO of crypto investment manager Merkle Tree Capital, told Decrypt.

The recovery has been as swift as the crash was brutal. Bitcoin has surged 5% on the day to retake the $115,100 level.

Ethereum is leading the charge with an impressive 10.5% jump to $4,138, while major altcoins like Solana, BNB, and Dogecoin are soaring with double-digit gains.

Serroni explained the powerful bounce as “pure short-covering and mean reversion after the market overreacted to Trump’s tariff bombshell.”

He pointed to the “thin” selling pressure and the dramatic reset in open interest across derivatives markets, a sign that the carnage was primarily a technical event, a violent purge of “overleveraged derivatives traders” rather than a fundamental shift in the market’s long-term outlook.

His final verdict was a succinct and powerful summary of a wild and historic week: “This rout was a geopolitical knee-jerk, not a structural break.”

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