Anniversary Anxiety: Crypto Heads Into 10/10 With Its Tail Between Its Legs 🐶

Bitcoin slid to roughly $80,000 on Thursday, putting the asset on course for its weakest level in about a month as traders braced for the one-year anniversary of a flash crash that rattled markets last October. Bitcoin ($BTC) traded around $81,669, down 4% over 24 hours and more than 8% lower than the near-$87,000 print recorded four days earlier, according to CoinDesk data. The total crypto market capitalization dropped 4.4% in 24 hours to $2.77 trillion.

Selling extended across the major tokens, with ether ($ETH) and XRP each down about 6% over the past day and solana off 9%, while all three were lower by double-digit percentages over the past week. Bitcoin's session low reached $80,393, with a TradingView daily chart showing $BTC at $80,806, down 3.02% from the open of $83,321. More than $1 billion in leveraged bets were liquidated across the market, and $600 million of that was wiped out within a single hour, the largest hourly total in a month.

The action comes ahead of Saturday, October 10, the anniversary of a 2025 flash crash in which bitcoin plunged from about $122,000 to $105,000 — and lower on some venues — in minutes during thin Friday evening U.S. trade, days after a record above $126,000. On that date last year, a tariff shock forced out more than $19 billion in leveraged positions across over 1.6 million accounts, per CoinGecko data. Trader Unipcs, known on X as "Bonk Guy," argued the same triggers could flip into buy signals once the date passes; one analysis of a repeat found current liquidations run about $248 million per 1% drop, against close to $2.2 billion per 1% on 10/10/2025.

Beyond the calendar, investors cited rising oil prices and interest rates, regulatory uncertainty after the failure of the Clarity Act and upcoming U.S. midterm elections as additional headwinds. Ethereum researcher Justin Drake warned that AI could help attackers derive private keys from already-exposed public keys, potentially within months, and urged holders to migrate funds to unused addresses rather than panic. Glassnode estimates roughly 6.04 million BTC already sit behind visible public keys. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said on X that "I don't recommend anyone scramble to move their funds to new wallets today. But we should take the risks to cryptography from AI-accelerated math seriously, and minimize our exposure to not just quantum-vulnerable cryptography, but also potentially AI-vulnerable cryptography."

Despite the slide, a State Street survey of 300 asset managers, asset owners and wealth managers, published Tuesday, found about 51% of respondents expect digital assets to become mainstream within five years, up from 11% in 2024, with institutions holding an average 11% of portfolios in digital assets and expecting that share to rise over three years. Since 2013, bitcoin has gained in eight of 13 fourth quarters for a median return of 26%, according to Coinglass data, though post-peak years fell 16% in 2014, 42% in 2018 and 15% in 2022, and bitcoin bottomed at $58,525 on June 30 with Galaxy's Alex Thorn flagging a 50-week moving average as a reference for some cycle-focused buyers.