Key points

  • Bitcoin traded near $82,280 on Kraken at about 20:02 UTC, about 5% below Monday’s $86,506.6 open and 2.4% above Thursday’s $80,328.6 low. Ether, near $2,477, is down about 9% from Monday’s open.
  • Open interest has not rebuilt since Thursday’s flush, yet accounts holding longs outnumber shorts nearly two to one, according to Coinalyze data cited by CoinDesk.
  • The level is $80,328.6; a daily close, at 00:00 UTC, below the $80,100 low of the 20 Sep candle would take the market out of the 18–21 Sep base.

Bitcoin’s bounce is intact. The positioning behind it is the part to watch: spot has recovered much of Thursday’s drop while open interest sits where the flush left it, and the share of long positions has crept back.

On Kraken, Friday’s range was $81,542.8 to $83,462.9, a day inside Thursday’s wider $80,328.6 to $83,467.7. Equities did better than crypto this week. The S&P 500 closed Friday at 7,811.5, up 0.6% on the day and 1.2% on the week since 2 Oct, while Bitcoin’s close-to-close change over the same stretch was −2.6% and its drop from Monday’s open was about 5%. Coinbase (COIN) rose 4.3% on Friday and Strategy (MSTR) 1.9%, and both remain below their 5 Oct closes.

Related: Thursday’s market read

Leverage: quiet, but leaning long

Put simply, open interest is the total value of futures contracts still open, and the long/short ratio compares how many accounts bet on a rise with how many bet on a fall. When open interest is flat and the ratio tilts to longs, a drop meets more forced sellers than a rise meets forced buyers.

CoinDesk, citing Coinalyze, reported bitcoin futures open interest at $27.1 billion, down 1.9% in 24 hours and little changed since Thursday’s flush, with an aggregated long/short ratio of 1.85, or about 65% long, up from near parity at the start of the month. Funding was about 5% annualised, so longs are still paying to hold. Deribit’s perpetual showed 0.0034% per eight hours, roughly 3.7% annualised, when we checked at about 20:00 UTC. CoinGlass data cited by CoinDesk showed $1.09 billion of liquidations in 24 hours as of its 13:34 UTC update, about 85% of them longs.

Options are calmer than spot. Deribit’s DVOL, a 30-day implied-volatility index for bitcoin, read 35.98 at 20:00 UTC, near the bottom of its three-day range of 35.79 to 39.41. It was 38.88 at 15:00 UTC on Thursday.

Flows: the week through Thursday is red

US spot bitcoin ETFs lost $244.1 million on Thursday and $484.9 million on Wednesday, taking the week through Thursday to −$700.0 million by Farside’s daily totals. Friday’s figure was not on Farside as of about 19:57 UTC, so we are not reporting one.

Related: Thursday’s ETF Desk

The weekend carries an anniversary

Saturday marks a year since the 10 Oct 2025 crash. CoinGlass recorded more than $19 billion of leveraged positions liquidated over 24 hours, and bitcoin fell from a Friday high near $122,574 to about $104,800, according to CoinGecko. This week’s $1.09 billion is roughly 6% of that scale. It is context, not a forecast: crowded longs, thin weekend books and a macro headline were the ingredients then, and the long share is rising again.

Levels and the other view

  • Support: $80,328.6, Thursday’s low, which sits on the 18–21 Sep base, where Kraken’s daily lows ran $80,101 to $80,840.
  • Ceiling: $83,467, the two-day high, then $85,589, the 7 Oct high before Wednesday’s drop.
  • Invalidation: a daily close below $80,100 would put bitcoin out of that base.

The constructive reading is JPMorgan’s. Its analysts wrote that in the third quarter both ETF flows and futures positioning increased, creating “positive flow momentum into Q4”, though they also said cumulative ETF flows remain negative when measured from the 10 Oct 2025 market downturn. This week’s outflows run against that view for now.

Related: JPMorgan’s inflow estimate

On the calendar (UTC)

  • Sat 10 Oct: one year since the 10/10 liquidations; weekend liquidity is thinner.
  • Mon 12 Oct: US federal holiday (Columbus Day), per the BLS calendar.
  • Wed 14 Oct, 12:30: US CPI for September, the next scheduled macro test.
  • Thu 15 Oct, 12:30: US PPI for September.

Respect the thin hours.

Related: Coin Levels for Friday

As of 20:02 UTC (22:02 CEST), bitcoin was trading near $82,284 on Kraken and ether near $2,477. This is market commentary, not financial advice.

This article is for information only and is not investment advice.