Bitcoin slid below $75,000 on Friday for the first time since August, extending a sharp sell-off that has wiped out the cryptocurrency's post-election rally and forced more than $1 billion of leveraged bets to close in a single day.
The world's largest cryptocurrency fell to an intraday low of $74,780.91, its weakest price since 21 August, before steadying at around $75,570 in afternoon trading. The drop leaves Bitcoin down about 13 per cent so far this year and far below its record high of nearly $126,200 reached in October 2025. Only on Wednesday it had traded above $80,700, a high for the week that now looks distant.
The fall was not an isolated crypto event. It followed a brutal session on Wall Street, where technology shares led a broad rout. The Nasdaq Composite fell 5.52 per cent on Thursday, its worst day in 19 months, while the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index plunged more than 12 per cent and Nvidia alone lost more than 9 per cent. The S&P 500 dropped 4.36 per cent, erasing roughly $3 trillion in market value across its constituent companies in a single day.
Behind the equity sell-off lies a political shift. The Democratic Party's sweep of Tuesday's midterm elections has raised expectations of tougher regulation of artificial intelligence, including slower approval for the vast data centres behind this year's chip rally. Traders who had crowded into AI and semiconductor shares rushed for the exits, and the selling spilled over into crypto, which has traded closely with risk assets all year.
A stronger-than-expected American jobs report added to the pressure. The United States economy added 165,000 jobs in October, well above forecasts of around 65,000, while the unemployment rate fell unexpectedly to 4.1 per cent. The figures strengthened expectations of another interest rate rise from the Federal Reserve in December, and higher borrowing costs tend to weigh on speculative markets, leaving crypto exposed even as chip shares recovered some ground.
The speed of the decline caught many traders off guard. Data from CoinGlass showed $1.05 billion in crypto positions liquidated over 24 hours, with $930 million of that coming from long positions betting on higher prices. Bitcoin accounted for $267.2 million of the liquidations and Ethereum for $167.14 million. Thursday's liquidations alone topped $1 billion, according to reports from The Block, as exchanges automatically closed positions whose collateral no longer covered their losses, adding selling pressure to an already falling market.
Money has also been leaving the exchange-traded funds that hold Bitcoin directly. United States spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded more than $430 million in outflows on Thursday, led by about $200 million leaving Fidelity's FBTC and a further $105 million from BlackRock's IBIT, according to SoSoValue data. Outflows for the week reached nearly $870 million, and they have accelerated from the $515 million of outflows registered across the whole of October, a month that ended a three-month streak of inflows.
The wider crypto market fell with Bitcoin. Ethereum slipped towards the $2,220 level, erasing the gains that had carried it above $2,400 earlier in the week, while XRP dropped to around $1.18, down more than 7 per cent over 24 hours. The Crypto Fear and Greed Index fell to 28, firmly in fear territory, from 37 the day before and a neutral reading only a week ago.
Politics now hangs over the market as well. With Democrats set to take control of Congress in January, Senator Elizabeth Warren, a long-standing critic of crypto, is expected to chair the Senate Banking Committee, and analysts expect greater scrutiny of the industry. The CLARITY Act, the market-structure bill the industry had hoped would bring clearer rules, stalled in the Senate in September after a procedural vote failed 49 to 50, well short of the 60 votes needed to advance.
Not every corner of the crypto market fell. Shares in Bitcoin miners and the infrastructure firms that have pivoted towards AI computing rebounded sharply on Friday. IREN rallied more than 20 per cent after reporting a narrower-than-expected loss, with artificial intelligence cloud sales up 182 per cent from the previous quarter, while TeraWulf, Riot Platforms and Bitdeer each rose around 13 per cent. Coinbase pared its decline to about 1.5 per cent, although stablecoin issuer Circle fell more than 2 per cent.
On the charts, the picture is weakening. Bitcoin now trades below both its 50-day exponential moving average near $79,756 and its 200-day average near $76,497, and its relative strength index reads 37.7, below the neutral 50 mark but not yet at the oversold 30 level. The immediate support is the $74,780 intraday low; a daily close below it would shift attention towards the $73,000 to $72,500 area, and then the psychological $70,000 level. On the upside, traders are watching the 200-day average near $76,497 and then $80,000.
Whether this is a buying opportunity or the start of a deeper slide will depend on forces outside crypto itself: whether the AI stock rout stabilises, what the Federal Reserve signals next, and how the new Congress approaches digital assets. For now, the market that only days ago was celebrating a rally back above $80,000 is once again defending levels it last saw in the summer.
Figures in this report were checked at 05:22 PKT on 07 November 2026 against reports from Decrypt, Investor's Business Daily and FXStreet.
This post is market news information only, not financial advice.
