Bitcoin (BTC) Slips Below $83K After FOMC Minutes Signal One More Rate Hike

FOMC Minutes Point to One More Hike

The flush ended, but the tape did not repair itself. The Bitcoin (BTC) price sits near $82,800 early on Thursday, down 1.5% over the past 24 hours, after the market gave up the $85,000 line overnight and found no bid strong enough to reclaim it. The trigger is on the record: minutes of the Federal Open Market Committee's September meeting, released early Thursday, state that most participants judged one further increase in the federal funds rate before year-end would likely be appropriate. Selling had already begun before the document landed: rising crude oil prices and climbing US Treasury yields weighed on risk assets through Wednesday, a combination that drains appetite for leveraged longs. The hawkish rate path in the minutes then removed the case for an early rebound, and the derivatives market did the repricing. Aggregate crypto liquidations over the trailing 24 hours reached $295 million, and the direction was overwhelmingly one-sided: long positions accounted for $244.2 million, or 83% of the total, while short liquidations contributed just $50.8 million. Total liquidation volume shrank 47.10% from the previous day, yet the skew toward longs sharpened rather than faded. The final hour showed the same imbalance in miniature: of $3.9 million liquidated in the last 60 minutes of data, $3.05 million were longs, about 78%, against $0.85 million in shorts. In plain terms, traders who had borrowed to stay long through the hawkish repricing were the ones forced out, and the exits arrived as a steady drip rather than one violent sweep. That distinction matters for what follows. A drip of forced selling grinds a market lower without producing the sharp bottom a single cascade sometimes leaves behind, and at about 04:40 UTC spot had slipped a further 0.2% since the newest readings, keeping price pinned just under $83,000.

Downside Liquidity Bunches at $82,500

By coin, the damage concentrated where leverage sat heaviest. Ethereum recorded the largest liquidations at $91.13 million over 24 hours, with longs at $80.95 million, roughly 89% of its total. Bitcoin (BTC) followed at $67.51 million, of which $57.7 million were long positions, an 86% long share. Solana logged about $11.64 million and XRP about $9.84 million, and the altcoin liquidations on both again ran overwhelmingly against longs. The 12-hour window repeated the pattern at smaller size: $77.46 million in total, $52.66 million of it long, close to 68%. Aggregate positioning tells a subtler story than the liquidation count alone. Derivatives trading volume came in at $175.86 billion, down 2.30% from the prior day, yet fresh leverage kept entering Bitcoin derivatives: open interest rose 0.60% to $151.64 billion. Falling turnover alongside rising open interest means old leveraged positions closed and new ones opened at nearly the same pace. Should price leave the key liquidity bands, that stock of fresh positions becomes fuel for another round of forced exits. The liquidation map defines the near-term battleground. The densest liquidity below spot clusters at $82,500 to $82,600; a slide through it would likely trigger a further wave of long liquidations and could stretch downside swings as far as the $81,000 area. Above, a thinner band sits at $84,100 to $84,200, and a far heavier cluster of short-liquidation liquidity waits at $84,500 to $85,000. Direction therefore hinges on two levels: whether the $82,500 shelf holds, or whether price reclaims $84,000 and presses toward the heavier zone above, where covering shorts can amplify any rebound. Analyst Ali Martinez flagged a buy signal at $83,000 support after the 24-hour correction, and we noted earlier how the coin had languished near $83,000 even before the minutes landed.

Our own composite scoring frames the same map with harder edges. The nearest strong support on our combined model sits at $80,872, scored 92 out of 100, while the closest resistance waits at $84,063 with a score of 81; spot at $82,800 trades between them, above the $82,500 shelf but well short of the recovery band. Positioning is still long-biased: perp funding runs at 0.0022% and the long/short account ratio reads 1.75, with 63.7% of accounts long, a positioning measure rather than a liquidation split. The flushed clusters look sized well below crypto whale scale, and the selling ran through perpetual futures rather than spot ETF channels, which is why accounts that chose to HODL were untouched. Our Bitcoin technical analysis treats the $84,063 line as the pivot: through it, short covering can compound the recovery; below $80,872, the bias flips back down.