Morning Minute: Uptober Turns Sour as Crypto Majors Slide
Is this the beginning of a bigger selloff with the anniversary of 10/10 looming? Or just a leverage flush before the next leg up?
Bitcoin dipped below $81,000 Thursday, Ethereum fell close to $2,400 and the whole top ten board went red on seven days. Uptober is certainly not off to the often-memed start expected.
The damage was worse further down. Zcash fell 11% in a day, NEAR 16%, Pump.fun 11%, Venice Token 10%. Dogecoin and Chainlink are both down double digits on the week.
Spot Bitcoin funds shed $484.9 million on Wednesday, the worst day since the spring, followed by another $244M in outflows yesterday. That flips October negative at minus $400 million for the month. Ethereum funds have now bled money for eight straight sessions, losing $640 million over that stretch. Prices were climbing last week while inflows had already slowed to almost nothing. Rising prices without new money is a thin market, and thin markets give it back fast.
Multiple things turned at once. Tom Lee said Bitmine will stop buying Ethereum once it owns 5% of supply, roughly 100,000 coins away, removing a buyer that showed up every week since June 2025. Funding rates on Ethereum flipped negative midweek for the first time in months, meaning traders betting on a fall now outnumber those betting on a rise, and they added to those bets as price dropped rather than closing out. Oil jumped on attacks against Iranian tankers, pushing money out of anything risky. And of course, there was the Ethereum researcher telling everyone to prepare for “Bunker Mode.”
With that said, crypto majors have been rebounding over the past 12 hours. Bitcoin is back over $82k, ETH is re-approaching $2,500 and ZEC is now green on the day. And no part of the macro crypto bull case for this cycle (debasement trade continues, institutions coming onchain, tokenization acceleration, agentic crypto, etc.) has changed or weakened. This is much more likely a correction inside a decent run rather than a collapse. A chance to flush all the leverage and late longs before grinding higher for the next leg of the emerging bull market. And of course this comes just a day before the anniversary of 10/10 and the nasty selloff that started the bear market one year ago. Here’s hoping we get a “Reverse 10/10” tomorrow…
