Bitcoin (BTC) Dipped Below $81,000 Intraday on Thursday as Nasdaq Slid

Update 01:33 UTC: A report that Anthropic's revenue growth had slowed, alongside attention to the large debt load at CoreWeave, an operator of AI datacenters whose corporate bond yields rose above 15%, preceded the sell-off.

Tech Rout Reaches Crypto

On Thursday, the Bitcoin (BTC) price briefly lost the $81,000 level in intraday trading as a technology-led equity rout carried over into digital assets. The channel between the two markets ran through borrowing costs. Global bond markets pushed yields to their highest readings in years just as companies increased debt issuance to fund artificial intelligence infrastructure, and investors began asking how long the AI investment cycle could sustain that pace. Yields at those levels raise the discount rate on long-duration assets, the bucket both AI-linked equities and speculative crypto occupy, so the two tapes moved together. The Nasdaq Composite, the index that tracks heavily technology-weighted US listings, absorbed the damage across the week and finished the stretch ending with Friday's close down 4.5%. The selling did not stop at the weekly level: on Friday itself the index lost 2.1% and the S&P 500 fell 1.1%.

Bitcoin (BTC), the largest proof-of-work asset by market value, moved with that slide rather than decoupling from it. Our live monitoring puts spot at $81,793 as of Friday evening UTC, 0.9% lower over 24 hours and roughly unchanged since the later part of the session, so Thursday's dip below $81,000 did not extend into a sustained breakdown. Inflation data and interest-rate expectations sat alongside the AI-technology exit as the variables traders were pricing. Both readouts point the same way: expensive money compresses the valuations of assets whose payoff sits far in the future. The inflation side of that ledger had already left a mark recently, when the coin dipped below $80,000 on hot PPI, its first such break in a month. What this week's two-way tape leaves unconfirmed is the rotation question, whether capital that exited technology stocks found its way into crypto. Nothing in the week's record shows that migration; the two markets simply fell together.

Deeper detail from this week's tape shows the breakdown went further than the article's Thursday record, and that the buyers changed hands. A market weekly tracking the session reports that after a hot US CPI print selling accelerated, with the coin sliding to around $79,750 on the 15th, below $80,000, before bid support at the lows lifted it back into the $82,000s by the 16th. Large liquidations ran through the move, cutting futures open interest sharply and pushing funding rates negative, a clear defensive tilt among short-term traders. At the lows, though, large buy orders were filled near $80,000 and replenished, and the count of large holders reached a record high, with a reported accumulation of roughly 60,000 Bitcoin (BTC) on Bitfinex near the $80,000–$86,000 range since the end of August.

Reporting on the same session adds company-level detail behind the AI exit. A report that Anthropic's revenue growth had slowed, alongside attention to the large debt load at CoreWeave, an operator of AI datacenters whose corporate bond yields rose above 15%, preceded the sell-off. Gartner warned on the 14th that more than $3.5 trillion of AI infrastructure investment could face impairment risk by the end of 2030. The move spilled into Asia: the KOSPI closed down 7.57% on the 15th, with Samsung Electronics off 9.48% and SK Hynix down 11.06%. The inflation prints, September CPI at 3.7% year over year and PPI at 6.3%, added rate-hike caution, though 15-year US Treasury yields actually fell on safe-haven buying, so the week's tape cannot be read as a pure rising-rate story.

June's Joint Slide

The co-movement has a precedent this year. In June, the same joint weakness appeared: while technology stocks sold off, altcoins Dogecoin (DOGE) and Hyperliquid (HYPE) lost 9.6% and 9.9% respectively, and Bitcoin (BTC) itself fell 5.3% over the same stretch. At the time, market observers read the flows as rotation inside the equity market, with money leaving semiconductor names for other listed stocks and crypto receiving none of it. That reading was an interpretation of price behavior, not a settlement-level record of whale activity, and it sat alongside crypto-specific burdens that deepened the June slide on its own terms. Spot Bitcoin ETF outflows, a restrictive Federal Reserve stance and a strong dollar all weighed on the market that month. Each of those pressures is measurable on its own ledger, unlike the rotation claim, which no transaction table yet supports.

Bitcoin's 5.3% June loss was nonetheless milder than the double-digit drawdowns in the two large altcoins, and this week's 24-hour loss of 0.9%, read against the index's 4.5% weekly drop, fits the same milder profile. The October setup rhymes with that list more than it repeats it. The macro variables traders cited this week, inflation data and rate expectations, mirror the pressures blamed in June, while the AI-linked equity exit has replaced the semiconductor exit as the equity-side driver. What the parallel does not establish is the direction of capital. A joint decline shows shared risk appetite, not proof that one market is funding the other. The week's record contains no aggregate flow data spanning both asset classes, and neither market publishes a ledger that would let a reader trace one into the other. Until such data exists, the claim that money rotating out of technology stocks arrives in crypto stays unverified, this week as in June.

The $81,426 Floor

Our composite levels frame where the tape stands. Spot printed $81,433.03 at the latest reading, down 0.82% over 24 hours, above the $80,818.46 support, which scores 94 out of 100, while the nearest resistance at $82,218.19 scores 90 out of 100. Funding of 0.0056% and open interest near $15.83 billion describe a derivatives book that has not been flushed, and the long/short account ratio sits at 1.83, tilted toward longs at 64.6%. RSI at 46.20 with a bearish MACD keeps the tape heavy, even as the broader trend remains an uptrend and the Fear & Greed Index reads 55, in greed territory, leaving the HODL cohort with little to react to. Fuller level detail sits on our Bitcoin technical analysis page. Price has spent its recent sessions inside that $80,800–$82,200 band, and a break past $84,221.67 is what would change the picture as the weekend opens (as of 03:06 UTC).