Bitcoin slips below $77,000 – ETF outflows, chip sell-off and the US midterms

Bitcoin's price came under pressure at the start of the week: on Tuesday morning it trades at around $76,700, almost 2 percent lower than 24 hours ago. Spot ETFs are seeing heavy outflows, tech stocks are falling, and today the US elects a new Congress.

The price: lowest level since August

In the morning the price briefly dropped below $76,400 – the lowest level since August. Over seven days it is down 3.7 percent. On Monday morning Bitcoin had still been heading toward $79,000; the recovery after the Binance hack has thus not continued for now.

The Nasdaq 100 slid into a correction, and a sell-off in chip stocks also dragged Asian markets lower.

ETFs: biggest IBIT outflow since June#

An important reason for the weakness is the spot ETFs. On Monday, net $398.6 million flowed out of US Bitcoin ETFs. BlackRock's iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) alone lost $405.3 million – the biggest daily outflow since June 26. Fidelity's FBTC, by contrast, recorded a small gain of $6.7 million. In October, net $515 million had already flowed out; year to date the balance is roughly $38 million in the red.

Brazil's largest exchange Mercado Bitcoin, according to The Block, confirmed a security incident of $46 million and halted withdrawals. And according to Decrypt, an unnamed institution in the EU lost more than $106 million from exchange accounts on Sunday, as reported by on-chain investigator ZachXBT.

Who is buying? Strive and the treasury companies#

But there are buyers too. Strive, the Bitcoin treasury company co-founded by Vivek Ramaswamy, bought 124 BTC for around $10 million between October 24 and 30, at an average price of $80,526, according to Decrypt. That brings Strive's holdings to 43,124 BTC, placing it fourth among publicly listed companies – just 390 BTC behind Twenty One Capital and 876 BTC behind Metaplanet. Strive's average cost basis of $87,785, however, is well above the current price.

What's coming: the midterms#

Today Americans elect a new Congress. After each of the last three midterm elections, Bitcoin fell significantly and only then reached its cycle low. The future of the Clarity Act, the planned US market-structure law for crypto assets, is also uncertain.

CoinDesk describes the opposing view: traders are betting on a rally after the election and point to outflows from exchanges, which suggest tighter supply.

For the coming days, three things matter: the election result and its consequences for crypto legislation, whether the ETF outflows continue, and whether Binance tops up its SAFU fund again. In the short term the $76,000 mark remains in focus – below it, Bitcoin would be at late-summer levels.

Liquid fully backed again

The Liquid sidechain is fully backed by Bitcoin again after the September hack. On Delving Bitcoin, a developer presents a node that can discard large OP_RETURN data, and a formal verification makes faster signature checking tangible.

Liquid: 1:1 backing restored#

The most important technical news of the day comes from Blockstream. On Monday evening The Bitcoin Insider reported: “JUST IN: 300 bitcoin spotted being deposited into the Liquid Network's bridge address”. The transaction is publicly visible on mempool.space; it was also discussed on Stacker News. Shortly afterwards came the confirmation: according to The Bitcoin Insider, the Liquid Network's peg is “officially back to 100% for the first time since early September”. At that time, a hacking incident in the bridge had left a hole of 600 bitcoin.

Blockstream itself wrote on Tuesday morning: “The Liquid Network's bitcoin reserves are fully restored: 1:1 BTC backing for all LBTC, verifiable by anyone running a Liquid node.” The last part is the crucial one. Liquid is a sidechain on which Bitcoin circulates as L-BTC. Every L-BTC is supposed to be backed by a real Bitcoin in the federation wallet. Anyone running their own Liquid node does not have to believe this statement, but can check it themselves. That is the difference between a promise and a verifiable proof – the same idea that is also behind the major exchanges' proof-of-reserves this week.

Satd: discard OP_RETURN data on request#

On Delving Bitcoin, developer bkeroack presents a new feature of his alternative node implementation satd. By his own account it is “the first Bitcoin node implementation to allow optional full OP_RETURN value pruning”. Three options control it: -pruneopreturn=N sets how many blocks behind the tip the data is removed (at least 288, matching the guarantee for “NODE_NETWORK_LIMITED”). -pruneopreturnsize=X determines the size from which data is discarded, and -restoreopreturns restores everything.

The recent controversy around BIP-110 showed “that a certain proportion of node runners care deeply about OP_RETURN value sizes and what they see as spam on the blockchain”. His personal view is that the space OP_RETURN takes up on mainnet is currently negligible. But the philosophical argument that non-financial data does not belong on the chain is real. Because pruning is possible without breaking consensus rules, every node operator can decide for themselves. In simple terms: the blockchain stays valid, only your own hard drive no longer keeps certain data attachments.

Post-quantum: Blockstream advocates hash-based signatures#

The quantum question remains on the agenda. Blockstream announced that the Director of Blockstream Research will speak on November 13 at the Digital Assets Forum in New York about “the race to replace Bitcoin's signatures”: “Bitcoin can get ahead of quantum.” In another post, Blockstream points to a paper on hash-based signatures – “post-quantum security built on the hash functions Bitcoin already trusts”. The appeal of this approach: it relies on building blocks that have been in use in Bitcoin for years.

Ecosystem: Fedimint, KaleidoSwap, Cashu and mining#

The weekly update covers “Nut November”, the month-long hackathon of the Cashu ecosystem. Lightning News calculated what it takes to mine a whole Bitcoin per day: around 2,400,000 TH/s, about 4,140 Antminer S23 Hydro units and almost 23 megawatts of continuous power – “industrial-scale infrastructure”.

There is nothing new on Bitcoin Core since the releases 29.5, 30.4 and 31.2 of October 28; the latest Optech newsletter remains #429. Anyone who has not updated yet should do so. Among other things, the three releases fix two memory leaks that the project disclosed the same day as CVE-2026-117349 and CVE-2026-117350. Both involve unbounded memory growth through crafted connections; updating is the simplest protection for all node operators.