Morning Minute: Bitcoin Breaks Below $80,000 as Iran Fears Hit the Weekend
Some relief is appearing this morning as oil and rates fall, with a big macro week ahead featuring major earnings, FOMC and key data drops.
Bitcoin slid below $80,000 this weekend after the Wall Street Journal reported Saturday that the U.S. is rapidly evacuating personnel from embassies and military bases across the Middle East. In a Friday memo to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of National Intelligence Jay Clayton wrote that “Iran has substantially increased efforts to target U.S. personnel.” The evacuations go well beyond earlier reports of diplomatic staff being pulled from Saudi Arabia.
BTC currently sits at $80,160, down 2.4% on the week. Ethereum fell 3.8% to $2,322, Solana 3.2% to $101 and the broader CMC20 index is off 2.3%.
Over 30 days, Bitcoin is down 4.8%. The majors around it average down 16.5%, more than three times as much. Ethereum off 13.6%, Solana 17.1%, XRP 17.4%, Hyperliquid 17.4%, Dogecoin 22.3%.
There is some positive. Zcash is up 8% on the week while everything else bled, and sits up 135% on the year. Monero is up 37%. Privacy is still catching a bid, in a week when the lead story is governments evacuating people ahead of attacks.
And we have a big week ahead. The Fed decides its next move with interest rates Wednesday at FOMC with Kevin Warsh’s press conference after, the ECB follows Thursday and the Bank of Japan Friday. Q3 GDP and September PCE data land on Thursday, the same day Coinbase and Strategy report after the bell.
Arguably more important than those above, at least for onchain, is the Robinhood earnings call on Tuesday the 27th. Will Vlad and crew address the tokenized stock pushback? Will they mention Robinhood Chain and its memestonk ecosystem? Will they launch a builders grant program? Big questions to answer, and ones that will likely decide the near-term future of that ecosystem.
And of course, U.S. midterms are eight days away. Expect another volatile week…
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