Bitcoin (BTC) Holds $81,000 Line After Slide to Five-Week Low

From $85,000 to $79,100

Bitcoin (BTC), the market's original proof of work asset, has spent the past week tracing a descending staircase rather than a single shock, and the levels tell the sequence in order: a ceiling near $85,000 less than a week ago, an almost immediate giveback to $83,000, a break beneath $81,000, and finally a slide to $79,100 over the weekend, the lowest print in five weeks. The decisive drop below $80,000 came on Monday evening, one day before the Federal Open Market Committee, the Federal Reserve body that sets US interest rates, convenes its latest meeting; Bitcoin spent Sunday repeatedly under the round-number line, failed to win it back through Monday, and has watched every rebound attempt since stall at the same ceiling near $81,000. The Bitcoin price now sits near $80,930, up 1.2% over 24 hours and essentially flat since Monday's late readings, back above $80,000 but still short of the band that has rejected each recovery attempt. Each rung of the staircase carried the same signature, a rejection, a quick leg lower and a pause to test whether the new level would hold, so that the $85,000 rejection and the $79,100 low set on Sunday, October 25, sit less than a week apart. The drawdown left Bitcoin's total market value near $1.6 trillion and handed back the whole of the week's earlier gains, leaving the market about 2.3% above the weekend low and 4.8% beneath the $85,000 ceiling it failed at days earlier. The next scheduled test is the FOMC outcome itself, due Wednesday, October 28, at the second-to-last meeting of the year, and it arrives with the market compressed between a freshly reclaimed floor and a stubborn overhead ceiling.

$78,068 Sits Under the Weekend Low

Read against our composite scoring, the recovery operates inside a narrow corridor. The strongest support beneath the market sits at $78,068, scored 98 out of 100 where the EMA 100, the Fibonacci 0.382 retracement and a high-volume node stack; overhead, the nearest resistance at $81,446 carries a score of 79 and has absorbed every rebound attempt since Sunday. Positioning has not joined the downtrend in kind: open interest holds near $16.3 billion and the perpetual funding rate sits at 0.0055%, effectively neutral, so leveraged books are neither unwinding hard nor paying any meaningful premium. Momentum reads the same way, with the RSI at 45.4, below its midline, and the trend label still set to downtrend; the complete scored map runs on our Bitcoin technical analysis page.

Altcoins Split as XRP Tests $1.30

While Bitcoin (BTC) worked to rebuild its floor, the wider altcoin tape split. Ethereum (ETH) drifted toward $2,300, Solana (SOL) slipped under $100 and TRON (TRX) fell beneath $0.33, while Zcash (ZEC) gained more than 3%, Monero (XMR) and Hyperliquid (HYPE) rose around 2%, and Quant (QNT) jumped more than 7% to reclaim the $200 line. The clearest exception was XRP, up almost 2% in a day and pressing the $1.30 resistance after Ripple announced final approval to establish a national trust bank in the United States, a charter that places a crypto-native firm inside the federal banking system; market data showed Bitcoin's share of the complex slipping below 60% during the slide, a rotation visible even inside a falling tape. Monday also brought a $1.01 billion net exchange outflow from exchange wallets, the kind of movement that trims immediately sellable supply and is typically read as accumulation by larger holders, the crypto whale class among them. Market maker Wintermute had earlier flagged the $80,000 support after a third straight weekly drop, and the line has since behaved as flagged, first breaking, then reclaimed. None of the week's movement disturbs the longer frame either: the supply schedule set by the Bitcoin Halving runs on regardless of where the FOMC lands, and the rhythm around it remains the backdrop against which this drawdown is measured. Selectivity, not broad risk appetite, drove the rotation: the day's gainers carried idiosyncratic stories, while the larger-cap altcoins followed Bitcoin's weakness lower. What the slide to $79,100 did not change is the market's basic posture. The cohort inclined to HODL through central-bank weeks has, for now, a tape that rewards patience: $80,000 has turned from a broken line back into the pivot every session argues around, and the $81,000 ceiling, not a fresh low, remains the level that decides the next leg.