Bitcoin Slides Below $108K, Crypto Stocks Sink as 'Uptober' Disappoints

Cryptocurrencies and crypto-related stocks opened lower Thursday as the Fed's surprisingly hawkish turn Wednesday outweighed solid progress on the Chinese trade front.

Presidents Trump and Xi met overnight and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent Thursday morning said the U.S. government is pausing plans to expand a blacklist of Chinese companies. He also touted an agreement for China to sizably up its purchases of U.S. soybeans this year and into the future.

Where once those sorts of headlines might have sent traditional and crypto markets higher, it appears the good news may have been priced in.

Instead, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell's insistence yesterday that further rate cuts were far from assured continued to rattle markets, with bond yields and the dollar both continuing to firm.

Bitcoin BTC$91,302.60 took out Wednesday's lows, plunging below $108,000 to its weakest price in more than a week. It's lost 4.4% over the past 24 hours and is down nearly 8% from Monday's high of $116,000.

Ethereum's ether ETH$3,108.16 tumbled 5% breaking below $3,800. Major altcoins XRP$2.0340, solana SOL$134.16, DOGE$0.1404 and ADA$0.4241 shed 5%-7% in a day.

Crypto-related stocks mirrored the broader market’s downward trend. Shares of Coinbase (COIN), which reports third-quarter earnings after the market-close, were down nearly 3%. Strategy (MSTR), Robinhood (HOOD) and Circle (CRCL) all fell 2% while Gemini (GEMI) took a bigger hit and dropped nearly 5%. Miners also traded lower.

Also dealing with a busy earnings season, the Nasdaq is lower by 1%, with Meta down 12% on disappointing results and Google ahead 5% after the opposite. The S&P 500 is only marginally lower and the DJIA is higher on the session.

October disappoints bulls

As October is nearly over, crypto traders' high expectation for a bullish month, often dubbed "Uptober," is almost certainly being shattered. At current prices, bitcoin is down more than 5% for the month in what would be its worst October return since 2014.

With crypto market in correction mode, the frenzy around digital asset treasuries (DAT), which took over Wall street earlier this year with public companies pivoting to purchase cryptos by selling shares and debt, continued to unravel. Many once-high-flying stocks fell below the net asset value of their underlying holdings.

Strategy (MSTR) has hit a fresh low since the April tariff tantrum, now trading at $268, down over 50% from its all-time high in November 2024, including a staggering fall of about 40% since the middle of July. The company reports third quarter earnings after the closing bell today. MSTR currently trades at a 1.33x premium to its net asset value (mNAV), its weakest per that metric since February 2024.

KindlyMD (NAKA), another BTC treasury, is down 6%, trading just below $0.90 and facing pressure of getting delisted from Nasdaq. Meanwhile, Strive (ASST) is trading below its $1.35 warrant price at $1.30, creating an obvious short-term headwind for further upside.

Thursday also brought another entrant into the DAT game with SEGG Media Corporation (SEGG), announcing a $300 million digital asset strategy to "generate sustainable on-chain yield, accelerate tokenization across sports and entertainment, and embed blockchain infrastructure into its global media ecosystem." Just months ago, the headline alone would have spurred major gains for the nanocap, but the DAT bubble having since been popped, shares are slipping 3% on Thursday.