Bitcoin Sinks to $80,500 After a Rising U.S. Inflation Print and a Kospi Circuit Breaker

Bitcoin fell below $81,000 during Asian trading on Thursday, touching about $80,500 around 06:00 UTC before steadying near $81,200, CoinGecko data show. Ether traded near $2,370, down about 5% over 24 hours.

The drop extended a selloff that began Wednesday, when the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that consumer prices climbed 0.6% from August to September and 3.7% from a year earlier. Gasoline drove the jump. The agency said the gasoline index climbed 9.1% in the month, “accounting for over half of the monthly all items increase.”

Core inflation, which strips out food and energy, rose 0.3% for a second straight month and reached 2.6% on an annual basis, up from 2.4% in August, according to the release.

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South Korea’s Kospi closed about 7.6% lower on Thursday at 5,554.22, and Japan’s Nikkei 225 ended down roughly 4.9%, Yahoo Finance index data show. The Kospi had fallen more than 9% earlier in the session, setting off a circuit breaker that halted trading for 20 minutes at 12:38 p.m. local time.

Dominick John, an analyst at Zeus Research, told The Block the declines in crypto and Asian stocks looked like part of a wider pullback from risk, “with weakness in U.S. tech stocks spilling into both markets rather than one directly causing the other.”

Leveraged traders took the brunt of it. Liquidations across crypto totaled $951.4 million over 24 hours, with $876.3 million of that coming from long positions, according to CoinGlass figures reported early Thursday. A narrower CoinGlass reading taken during Asian morning hours put bitcoin and ether futures liquidations at about $483 million, with ether accounting for $286 million and bitcoin for $197 million.

The inflation data lands two weeks before the Federal Reserve’s next policy meeting, scheduled for Oct. 27-28. At its previous meeting, the central bank raised its benchmark rate by a quarter point to a target range of 3.75% to 4% on Sept. 16, its first increase in more than three years.

Related Listen: Bits + Bips: Is Bitcoin’s Rally a Debasement Trade or a Short Squeeze?

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