Bitcoin Stalls Near $80,000 as Whale Positioning Turns Bearish Before Fed Decision

Bitcoin is holding near $80,000 with little directional conviction heading into the Federal Reserve's October 28 meeting, where futures markets assign a 90% probability to an unchanged rate decision. The focus has shifted to debates within the central bank over future policy direction, with analysts at Investing.com and BeInCrypto warning those internal discussions, rather than the rate call itself, could be the catalyst that breaks Bitcoin out of its nearly monthlong range.

Bearish signals are accumulating beneath the surface. Bitcoin whales on Hyperliquid turned net short for the first time since March, according to Glassnode, reversing the bullish positioning that had held since early in the year. The Coinbase Premium has been negative throughout October, pointing to weak U.S. spot demand, while Wintermute flagged $636 million in net outflows from U.S. spot ETFs in a single day last Thursday. Bitcoin fell 2.43% last week to roughly $80,500, and the 30-day trading range has compressed to just 10.2%, the tightest since mid-August.

Hilbert Group analyst Jesse Marre set a firm floor at $75,500, saying Bitcoin must hold that level to preserve its bull market structure amid tight liquidity and continued Fed uncertainty. Benzinga framed the immediate binary as a drop to $76,000 or a reclaim of $82,000 following the meeting. Bitfinex separately identified potential overhead supply from holders of 874,000 BTC that could weigh on any rally, while a CryptoQuant analyst cited historical patterns in coins held longer than 18 months as a potential setup for the next leg higher.

On the market structure side, seven large transfers totaling $1.40 billion moved from Binance and Coinbase Institutional to unidentified wallets in a three-hour window, with two additional transfers worth $339.3 million flowing into Coinbase Institutional. Bitcoin open interest rose 4.38% across five major futures markets, with XRP posting the highest funding rate at 0.0100% per eight hours and Ether recording the largest long-account share at 77.6%.

In a product development, Crypto.com and OG.com jointly launched regulated crypto perpetual contracts for U.S. traders, offering up to 5x leverage with no expiration date. The contracts, accessible through both the app and exchange, allow traders to take long or short positions on cryptocurrency prices without holding the underlying assets.

In the stablecoin market, USDC has overtaken USDT in euro-denominated transactions, capturing a 56% market share, a milestone attributed to USDC's regulatory compliance profile in Europe.