Bitcoin steadies near $82,500 after Trump rules out Iran strike before midterms

Bitcoin BTC$82,498.04 heads into the weekend about 4% lower than at the same time last Friday, even after recovering to around $82,500 from a low near $80,300 on Thursday. Ether ETH$2,490.10 slid 9% over the week to around $2,500.

The BTC rebound followed a Truth Social post from President Donald Trump on Thursday saying the U.S. would not attack Iran before the Nov. 3 midterm elections. Brent crude has slipped about 1% today to around $103 a barrel.

Smaller tokens led the recovery, with the CoinDesk 80 up 2.2% since midnight UTC, more than twice the gain in the CoinDesk 5.

The bounce has yet to undo Thursday’s damage, however, with the CoinDesk 100 still 2.2% lower over 24 hours and DeFi tokens down nearly 4%. U.S.-listed bitcoin, ether and zcash ETFs posted outflows on Thursday, leaving XRP funds as the only crypto products to take in money.

Ethereum Foundation researcher Justin Drake’s call for a “bunker mode,” which spurred negative sentiment alongside Thursday’s selloff, has also drawn pushback. Coinbase cryptographer Yehuda Lindell dismissed the concerns as “FUD” — fear, uncertainty and doubt — saying there was no evidence that the elliptic-curve assumptions behind bitcoin and ether had been broken.

U.S. equity futures also rose on the back of Trump’s comments, with Nasdaq 100 index futures up 0.83% since midnight and S&P500 futures adding 0.44%.

• Bitcoin futures open interest has slipped 1.9% over 24 hours to $27.1 billion, according to Coinalyze, and has barely moved since Thursday’s afternoon’s flush even as bitcoin recovered to around $82,500, suggesting the rebound has come without fresh leverage.
• Funding rates remain positive at about 5% annualized, with the predicted rate slightly higher, meaning longs are still paying to hold their positions. Deribit’s Oct. 30 futures trade at an annualized basis of around 7%.
• Accounts holding long bitcoin positions outnumber shorts by nearly two to one. Coinalyze’s aggregated long/short ratio stands at 1.85, or around 65% long, up from close to parity at the start of the month.
• CoinGlass data shows $1.09 billion of liquidations over the past 24 hours, with longs accounting for $931 million, or around 85% of the total. Ether led with $345 million, ahead of bitcoin at $266 million and solana at $65 million. The largest single liquidation was a $20 million ETH-USD position on Hyperliquid.

• Starknet STRK has jumped 33% over 24 hours after the network said it is actively considering leaving Ethereum to become a standalone layer-1 blockchain, targeting full quantum resistance by 2027. The plan has yet to be approved. It comes days after Pudgy Penguins’ Abstract became the second Ethereum layer-2 network to shut down in a week.
• Kaia KAIA$0.03783, the layer-1 formed from the merger of Kakao’s Klaytn and LINE’s Finschia, rose 40% since midnight on the back of a listing from Upbit, Korea’s largest exchange. Other layer-1 coins joined the bounce, with aptos APT$0.8161 up 12% and cosmos ATOM$1.9402 and polkadot DOT$1.1643 adding nearly 10%.
• Thursday’s biggest winners have more than given back their gains. Algorand ALGO$0.1176, which led the CoinDesk 100 on Thursday morning with a 9% advance, is down 14% over 24 hours, and curve CRV$0.3427 has dropped 13% after an 11% rise.
• Two AI tokens missed the recovery after an OpenAI revenue disclosure hit AI stocks. On Thursday, CNBC confirmed that OpenAI told investors it had $50 billion in annualized revenue at the end of September, below a $68 billion figure widely reported last month, and the Nasdaq Composite index posted its biggest one-day drop since mid-August. AI agent payments token kite KITE$0.1262 and venice VVV$22.34 have each lost about 9% over 24 hours and are still slightly lower since midnight.
• Pyth Network PYTH$0.08379, the oracle token, has gained 13% over 24 hours, making it one of only a handful of tokens higher in both timeframes.