HTX Research Warns Election-Friendly Outcome May Not Lift Crypto After $1.36B ETF Outflows

HTX Research Maps Midterm Volatility

A US midterm result that favors the crypto industry could still leave prices lower if inflation and dollar funding conditions keep deteriorating, an outlook published by HTX Research on October 23 argues. The report, which examines the digital asset market before and after the November 3 elections, states that volatility may widen and that asset-by-asset flows could diverge rather than move together. Policy expectations alone, the analysis holds, will not carry a rally: gains need support from pricing conditions, funding costs and fresh capital inflows. HTX Research, the research arm of the crypto exchange HTX, set its data cutoff at October 15. The US midterms take place on November 3, local time, and will fill all 435 House seats together with a portion of the Senate. The report stops short of treating the vote as a direct regulatory trigger: the outcome would shape the pace of legislation and the tone of oversight over the following two years, but it would not immediately change any crypto statute or supervision regime. Legislative speed is, in that view, a two-year variable, while the near-term price tape answers to different inputs. Around the vote itself, the analysis expects prices to be repriced by political headlines, with performance gaps opening between individual assets, from Bitcoin to altcoins. That conditional framing matters for how the call should be read: if an outcome read as industry-friendly lands while the funding backdrop worsens, the implication is a market that falls anyway, because the drivers the report weights most heavily, macro conditions and fund flows, would point the other way. Short-term price action, in that framing, responds more directly to those variables than to the legislative calendar that follows. The analysis sets no price targets and forecasts no returns; it instead separates the policy expectations a result creates from the actual money that enters or leaves the market.

Farside Data Shows $1.36B Outflows

The caution rests on two data legs, rates and fund flows. On the rates side, the Federal Reserve raised its target range by 25 basis points on September 16, taking it to 3.75%-4.00%. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' September consumer price index, released October 14, rose 0.6% month over month and 3.7% year over year, while the core index, which strips out food and energy, climbed 2.6% over the year. For readers weighing how to invest in crypto ETFs and funds, the report treats that mix of sticky inflation and tighter money as the reason election headlines may not convert into buying. Flows tell a similar story. Citing tracking by Farside Investors, the report records $537.4 million in net outflows from US spot Bitcoin ETFs and $825.1 million from spot Ethereum ETFs between October 1 and October 14, a combined $1,362.5 million, or roughly $1.36 billion. The figure covers ETF flows only; it is not an outflow for the crypto market as a whole. HTX Research draws the line explicitly so the election narrative is not mistaken for a proxy for aggregate market outflows. That distinction matters when reading the post-election period, since a reduction in policy uncertainty could still coincide with continued redemptions if spot demand does not recover. Against that baseline, the report lists three conditions it would watch for a turn: sustained net inflows into spot ETFs, improved demand in the stablecoin and spot markets, and a halt to further deterioration in the rate path. Any one of these, on its terms, would say more about the market's direction than the seat counts from November 3. Performance differences across the market cap spectrum are expected to widen either way, with crypto futures positioning repricing asset by asset as the vote approaches.

A Flow Test, Not a Vote Test

Our reading: the report converts the midterms from a binary catalyst into a flow test. Whatever happens on November 3, the market that inherits the result is the one on record: $1.36 billion out of spot ETFs through October 14, core inflation at 2.6%, and a policy rate at 3.75%-4.00%. Those figures hold regardless of which party takes the House. The macro lens also leaves ecosystem-specific threads unaddressed, from injunctions filed in Kazakhstan against the exchange and five peers to the burn of 9.39 trillion tokens that HTX DAO recorded in Q3, up 25.6% from Q2, and the token's own chart setup is a matter for HTX technical analysis rather than macro flows. That gap between macro conditions and asset-specific events is where the divergence the report expects is most likely to appear.