Bitcoin cracks below $81,000 and $951 million in leveraged bets are wiped out as Seoul's Kospi plunges 8%

Bitcoin broke below $81,000 overnight and nearly $1 billion of leveraged crypto positions were closed out, as Wednesday's hot US inflation print rolled through Wall Street and into Asia. The Block put bitcoin at $80,764 as of 11:50pm ET on Wednesday, down 3.6% in 24 hours, with ether down 6.5% at $2,353, Solana off 4.8% and XRP down 4.7%. Zcash was the worst of the top ten, falling 12.8%.

Liquidation data from CoinGlass, cited by The Block, showed $951.4 million of positions force-closed in 24 hours, $876.3 million of them longs. CoinDesk, using the same data in the Asian morning, counted about $286 million in ether futures and about $197 million in bitcoin futures, with roughly $30 billion of ether contracts still open against $52 billion for bitcoin.

The trigger was the same one that pushed bitcoin under $82,000 on Wednesday: US consumer prices rose 3.7% in the year to September, and core inflation rose to 2.6%, putting an October rate hike back in play. CoinDesk said CME FedWatch odds of a hike briefly reached almost 47% before falling back to about 26%. The selling spread to South Korea, where the Kospi fell 8% in the morning session and tripped circuit breakers, and to Japan, where the Nikkei 225 lost 5.2%. US spot bitcoin ETFs were already bleeding, with about $261 million of outflows on Wednesday, per Farside Investors.

Rick Maeda of Laevitas told The Block the scale of long liquidations "suggests significant leverage has already been flushed out." The question now, he said, is whether spot buyers return before the Fed decides.